 We're back. We're live. It's the, what is it, the three o'clock clock here in Hawai'i Nei. And we have a special show with Kirby Wright, who joins us from California by remote. Hi, Kirby. Aloha. How you doing, Jay? Good. Yeah. So, I understand you're an author, and you've written a book, a nonfiction book, about a story dear to your heart and probably dear to the hearts of everybody in Hawai'i about your mother. My grandmother. My grandmother. Pardon me. I don't want to make, you know, I don't want to make you older than you are. You are the son of Harold Wright, who was one of the founders of the Cade Shuddy firm, which we all know on Bishop Street. You got it. And you're living in California. Where are you, where are you right now? I'm right now in a inland town away from the coast called Vista, California. Vista, okay. Yeah. Joining us, joining us by the Alvimix call. And we want to talk about your book, which you, which you called the Queen of Molokai, referring to your grandmother, who I guess came here in 1916 when she was 15 years old. No, no, she was, she was born here, born and raised here. Ah, okay. I see. Got Hawaiian blood. Yeah, we got Hawaiian blood, goes back to my great great grandmother, pure Hawaiian from Maui. Okay. All right. Well, why don't you first tell us the reasons that you wrote this book about your grandmother and the Queen of Molokai? Well, you know, Jay, the feeling that I got was, I'm not getting any younger. And I wanted, she was, she meant a lot to me, my grandmother. And I wanted to capture her story. I wanted to document her life story and not let that slip away. And I kind of wanted to use that book as an example for other writers or would be writers in Hawaii to document their elders' stories before it's too late. It was almost too late for me. And the idea came from my wife, Darcy. I was gnashing my teeth, wondering what to write. I was writing futuristic books and they weren't that fulfilling. She said, duh, write about your grandmother because she had a very interesting life story. And this is a woman that really was a very spoiled and ran the streets of Waikiki and was boy crazy and was infatuated with one of the founding members of the Outrigger Canoe Club. And the only thing is he was older than her and he married a local gal. And she kind of was, you know, and gone with the wind when the woman at the end says, you know, I don't care as God as my witness, I'll get that guy back. Well, that's what she did. But he left the islands to go. He volunteered for the war. And his name was Chipper Gilman, one of the founding members of the Outrigger. And he was, he joined Alexander Hume Ford, who was the founding father of the Outrigger. And he felt that it was his duty, even though we were a territory of Hawaii, to go over to France. And what he did was interesting. He had a Harley Davidson. He gave him a Harley and they had him relay messages from the brass to the front lines in France. And he had to run in with Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway saw the Harley and said, you know what, I want to use your Harley to rescue injured Americans that are in the front. And he says, well, how am I going to get those messages to the front line? And they actually had a fight. They had a boxing match in France and they duped it out. And my uncle won that fight. And he has a very interesting past because his brother, believe it or not, was the first football All-American from Hawaii. Oh, interesting. From Harvard. He was a Harvard, I believe, is a linebacker. And he excelled. He got this, he was all-American in 1915. And Harvard says, we got a little come in and talk to the dean. And he came out and talked to the dean. And they said, we like your performance in the field, but you've been expelled because you're flunking out of all your classes. How did you get this information? This is information that may not be easy to get because it's embarrassing sometimes for the people involved, no? Oh, yeah. But I mean, you know, I'm the kind of writer, if I'm telling a true story, I don't candy coat anything. I tell the truth. It's a very, you know, they're comparing the book. Some of the early critics are comparing it to Pat Conroy with Prince of Tides. And they also say it's similar to Angela's ashes with Frank McCourt because of women overcoming great hardship. And by hardship, I mean my grandmother ran the streets wild at 16 and got pregnant with two boys from two very different men out of wedlock and she was only 18. So who did you talk to to develop this, you know, this oral history that you wrote down? Well, I spent every summer with my grandmother on the island of Molokai because my brother and I would fight all the time. We're only a year apart. They call us Irish twins. And my father was Senate of us up to harden us to be with grandma's underground mother supervision. And I was the type of guy who liked to just hang out with her and hear her stories. And what happened was I began to connect the dots. And I think a lot of people, this is good advice, you're going to get some stories from some people. I got other stories from my father. And I began to connect the dots and put the family history together. So the book is really the way I look at it. It's kind of Downton Abbey Senate Waikiki because it documents the right struggle and it's a real reversal of fortune because her grandmother from Maui married a very wealthy sea merchant from Italy. And they got married and Maui. And then they moved to Honolulu. He was, I mean, this was the guy who traveled. He was in the Marquardt Jesus Island and met Gauguin and barred some of our Gauguin's art way back when. So, but the only, yeah, the only thing was this guy, the Italian is 42 years old. He's in his schooner cruising along the coast of Maui. He spots my great great grandmother, falls in love with her, walking on the beach and asks for her hand in marriage. She, he's 42 and she's 15. Wow, there's a difference of age. You have some photos you want to show us about some of the characters you wrote about, some of the people you wrote about? Well, the photos that I attached are my grandmother and horseback on a property. This one, this one is on her property. She has purchases herself from Sophie Cook, who is a very powerful part of the Judd family who married into the Cook family. This was the union of two very powerful Kamayana families, the Judds and the Cooks. And Sophie Cook felt bad for my grandmother because my grandmother could only get work as cleaning homes. She cleaned homes for a living. And Sophie Cook said, you know, I can help shape this young woman's future if she buys Ahupua on the east end of Moa Kai. And my grandmother was stunned. You know, my grandma, she goes, now let me see. Sophie, it begins at the water and it ends where? And Sophie turned and said, look at the sky. It ends with the sky meets the mountain. Oh, wonderful. So she bought this, she bought, but she didn't have the money. And Sophie says, well, how much have you got? How much have you and Shipper saved? And she says, we, we had the very most of $200. How much do you want for it? And Sophie says, well, since you work for me, you clean my home. You're diligent and a good worker. And I know you're struggling. You can have the whole 250 acres for $3,000. So that's where I spent my summers. And that's why I mined the information from my grandmother. Just, you know, as, you know, it was just very interesting to me. And I never thought I was going to write it down. But years later, I began connecting the dots. And I began to merge those dots with what my father told me, who was a lawyer, who I, I pretty much believe most everything he said. So, and so the book is actually a combination of all of those facts all connected. And, and you know, what, when I, I was recently interviewed and I'm, I've got a kind of a new genre here because I'm, I call it creative nonfiction, but come on up because in the book, I roll in Kamehameha. And what Kamehameha was doing about Molokai. And the reason for that is because Sophie Cook was a avid Kamehameha history fan and told my grandmother that this land you are going to buy was the bread basket for Kamehameha and his warriors before they assaulted Oahu. Very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. In fact, the land was so fertile you could do dry taro. You didn't have to do lois. It was so moist, the soil, you go dry taro on it. Uh-huh. Is it still in the family of this land? Yeah, still in the family. And it's called Hale kawai kapa, which means home of the sacred waters. But it was an incredible struggle because she, she made the deal with Sophie Cook alone. This is, you know, he took the bull in her own hands and, and her husband was working as a cattle driver at Molokai Ranch at the time. And she says, guess what? We just bought a property Ahupua in the East. And he goes, how the hell are we going to pay that mortgage? And Sophie Cook said, you know, of course the deal they made. So he says, give me the 200. I'll sell it to you for $3,000. I'll carry the remainder. Pretty good deal. Yeah, it was a good deal. So they, you know, and so, you know, in the closing chapter, it's called Hale kawai kapa, where they're on that property. And she goes, how the hell am I going to pay that mortgage? And she goes, Shipper is going to have to learn how to scratch out a living. And I'm going to help him scratch. Great. So as luck would have it, there was another ranch on the east end called Uhoku Ranch. This is Halawa Valley. Yeah, towards the other way to Halawa, but it was the high country, you know, on the way. It was probably five to six, seven miles east on the way to Halawa Valley, east of her Hale kawai kapa property. And, and she went to the owner of Uhoku Ranch. She goes, you're crazy. You're crazy. I would never, ever let a woman drive cattle with men. And she says, what is it gonna take? And she got in her hands and knees. And he says, look, he goes, look, he goes, Julia, I'm going to make you a fence rider. You ride fence for a year. You, you find breaks in that fence sign, you repair them, we'll talk again. She did that for a whole year. And he says, you ride with your husband now and you drive cattle. And it was funny. Their first, uh, drive, they had about 50 head of the nice charley cattle, these beautiful white cattle. They drove them from the top of the hills down to Puko Harbor. And he was exhausted. You know, she was, oh, thank God we're here. And Chipper looks at her and goes, are you insane? We're just beginning. You've got to rope every single head of cattle and drag it out to that sandpan with those two Hawaiian guys. They're turning water. So she's, she's got, she goes, she heathers the cow and she's pulling it into the water. Her car, her horse is swimming, pulling a swimming cow. Where was this? Is this when they were loaded on, uh, barges or boats to take them to Honolulu? Yeah, you got it. You got it. You got it. And they worked so long and so hard that they actually got into the harvest moon and they relied on the moon and the stars to get back to Puhoku Ranch. And the initial, the initial, they had no home and Hawaii couple and had to save money. And they had to clear the kiavi forest too before they could live there. So they had, they had a stone home that they gave, they gave the Paniolos at Puhoku Ranch and that's where they lived for a year. And in their spare time, in their spare time, which they didn't have much of, they would go and begin to clear the kiavi. Oh yeah, a lot of kiavi on Molokai. So have you, have you been to this land? Have you spent time at this land? Was this a place you went to regularly when you were a kid or what? Oh yeah, absolutely. As I said before, my, my mother and father, my mother was East Coast and she never was really good around boys and craziness and we were rough and tumble and we're always fighting and she was glad to get rid of us every summer. So you know, and grandma was, you know, going to set the rules and set the discipline and she did and gave us chores and so forth. She gave me my first horse when I was four years old. She had a horse wreck and she gave me this big row and mare to ride. And I said, oh, I said, let me take the flash down the beach. Just go ahead. And I did, I raced flash on the beach. She says, take flashing out the mountain if you want. So I took it off the mountain, which he owned. And then I came back and I said, one more time down the beach. She said, you, you're gonna call me the little monster. And she said, you know what, you're a little monster. You're gonna, you're gonna ride that horse. I took her down to the beach. I wrote her to us the next morning. She dropped a hole. Oh yeah. Wow. Interesting. Well, it was all about, all about ranching in those days. I recall the Cook Ranch dominated Molokai for generations. And I suppose the Cook Ranch was the center of life on Molokai in those days. Wasn't it? Yeah, it really was. I mean, it was called Molokai Rash and Cook, his father owned it and he gave it to George Cook to run. And Sophie, and they had a very nice, they had one of the first swimming pools on the island. And they had their kids and they would bring their, send their kids every school year back to Hawaii for education. Honolulu. So they would only visit in the summer. They were quite terrific though, because they brought a lot of the World War II vets over there for R and R and, you know, try to, you know, reacclimate them to normal kind of living and so forth. So my grandmother's relationship was interesting though with Sophie Cook, because my grandmother was a city girl. She had never killed an animal before and Sophie Cook was quite a hunter. And there were deer there, the Axis deer, wasn't it? Yeah. My grandmother said, and Sophie Cook pulls off this huge buck knife after shooting the deer. It says, now we're going to see it slid its throat. Oh no. Yeah, yeah, slid its throat and then hang it up later and butcher it. And my grandmother was absolutely Paul. So what's interesting about this book is that transition from this spoiled city girl at 16 years old and walking through Waikiki, looking for male attention to having these two kids at a wedlock. And then she actually went to Molokai chasing after Shipper, because they weren't married. They were not married as she went on the hopes that he would marry her. So why did you call her the Queen of Molokai? You must have thought about that title and considered that as you have all that you know and all that you wrote. Why did you entitle the book the Queen of Molokai? Well, I called her the Queen of Molokai. This is very strange, but I had developed a short story that won awards called the Queen of Molokai with her at a later state. I have her during World War II and some of the effects she had on the island and what she did, you know, she would get on a horse and that horse, I've never seen it. That horse would not just walk or just trot, it would prance. And he had a very interesting relationship with animals and horses. And I consider her like the Queen of Molokai because she was very instrumental. She joined the USO and she put on all of the shows for the vets who are R&R on Molokai. And one of the, she discovered a lot of talent over there and she dressed her girls up like rockets. And she got all of the, yeah, she got all of the right. And you know, the women were really meticulous. The mothers, they would get magazines from New York and they would stitch pillbox hats, sequined hats, anything that were similar to the style of the 20s. And then, you know, not the 20s but the 40s, and then they'd bring the girls on stage to death for the GI. Where does the book end, Kirby? I mean, you've covered an awful lot of ground between early teens, 20th century till the 40s. How far do you go? Well, this is kind of interesting because that was my end story where she closes by entertaining the GIs and ends up meeting this handsome lieutenant from the army. And she's tempted, you know, she's married at the time, but also she's upset because Shipper is eating on local women with local women. So she, you know, she goes, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. There's that conflict kind of thing. And that was kind of how I wanted to end it. But guess what? I started in, I only got four years into her life and I got 300 pages. So I had to, you know, I had to say, wait, I got it. And because I'll have a 1,400 page manuscript, I just want to get book one out. Yeah. So how long is the book now? I mean, the final copy. The final copy is 300 pages. And it's, it's really sad too, because he leaves your sons, but then I have two chapters sitting kind of key because of the reversal of fortune. They had this beautiful land and property in Polola Valley that was inherited from her grandmother. And it was lost. They lost everything. And they're forced to live in a shanty, not a shanty, but like a two bedroom house on 9th Avenue in Kaimaki with one bathroom for about 10 people. And it's very interesting because the, she meets an Englishman at a dance in Imoana and so does her older sister. So the two sisters meet two brothers, two local girls meet two, these, you know, fancy pants English guys, but it just so happens that the older brother who falls in love with her older sister get married, but her guy, her English guy leaves her pregnant and goes to sentences. So many, so many interesting human twists in this. So what was her name, your grandmother? What was her name? Her name was Julia Wright. Yeah, my name is Ryder Julia Wright. That was, yeah, that was her name. When did she die? She died in 1982 on Molokai. Yeah. And this is, this is her honor property that she just bought from Sophie Cook for $200 down. And she's, she's never ridden a horse before, but had to learn and, and she learned, you know, she was forced to adapt to that rugged country life. You know, and, you know, when she got to the West end first, she was at Molokai Ranch and there's no running water. There's no nothing. There's an outhouse. She's not used to all that kind of stuff. So, but what's very interesting is she takes her sorrow and her, her, she's waiting to be married and her older brother, Tommy, is saying, well, what's, what's this guy all about? Is he going to marry you or not? I mean, we've been waiting a year for this, you know, wedding proposal. I mean, he doesn't come through. He's kind of a non-committal Paniolo, but a, but a, but a decorated vet. He's a, he's a, you know, seven years per senior, but incredibly well decorated and stuff. And, but when he comes back from the war, he doesn't know how to fit in. He's a, he's, was originally a beach boy with the Outer Air Canoe Club, but all the younger guys are kind of, you know, taking over and they're taking the tourist women on all our little, you know, canoe rides and surf lessons and stuff. So he really doesn't know how to fit in. And then he gets the offer from Cook to come over and drive cattle on Molokai Ranch, which he does. And then on top of that, Cook says, I want to make more money. And he goes, well, what do you want? What do you have in mind, George Cook? And he says, I want to raise sheep and not only raise sheep and, and, you know, use that for meat or sell it, I want to share them. And I want to send that their, their wool to Germany and New York City. And that's what he does. And they say, Chipper now you're talking about? Right, right. How long did he live? Chipper lived until about 1970. He died. He passed away, you know, 12 years, but they had such a volatile relationship that it came to the point where they divorced. But my grandmother felt bad for him. So she had this big property and she says, look, I'll give you it. I'll give you a life estate. So she gave him a life estate next to this, the corner one, the eastern boundary of her property, which was distantly separated from her place. And I remember spending a lot of time with them both because she would cook for him occasionally and bring, you know, lamb stew over to them. And they would talk story on his line. And there again, I began piecing together pieces of their history. That's a great job you've done. I mean, it's an important job. It gives us a window into those times. And, you know, people who you don't meet, you don't meet people like that today. They are truly a Hawaii phenomenon with all the all of the vectors and all the experiences they had for such a long period of time, right? And then for our time, isn't it? Yeah. And then, you know, I also wanted to pay homage to hotels that meant a lot to my grandmother. And one of those hotels was, you probably remember it, the Alexander Young Hotel. Oh, sure. I worked in that building for many years. I've got major descriptions and you feel like you're right in the hotel. Yeah. Oh, that's really important to know about this. So it's just published. Can I get it on Amazon? Where can I find the book, Kirby? Yeah, you can get it on Amazon. It's with Kindle and also hard copy. And then if you want to buy it earlier, you want to come to my book signing. I've got a great book signing in Coco Marina. And I avoid bookstores. I don't go to bookstores at all. I don't sign it. I do not. I sign where it's fun, where people can have fun. And that's why I picked breweries. I sign at breweries. And they do have fun. Yeah, yeah. So you can find, you can find me at Coco Marina. And I've got a classmate coming who is a former Miss USA. Okay. That always brightens up a book signing. So Kirby, Kirby, you know, you're living in California. Are you a professional author there? Have you, have you done other books? Will you do other books? Where do you fit? I mean, you talk like an author. That's tended to be a compliment. But have you done others? Will you do others? And what will they be like? Well, I have actually written 13 books. I graduated from San Francisco State University. I studied with Francis Mays who wrote Under the Tuscan Sun. I also studied with Ann Rice who wrote the vampire book. You think the, you think this book, The Queen of Molokai, could ever be a movie? After all, we did The Descendants, right? You know about that. That was one of those thousand Hawaii stories that made it to Hollywood. But here's another, clearly a story that could be that could make it to Hollywood. Do you have any thoughts about that? Any discussion about that? Yeah, I do. And as a matter of fact, I'm trying to get my cousin who was in, was in Hollywood for a little while. He was with Baywatch, Calahe Miller. And I'm trying to get him interested in maybe playing one of the lead roles. I do not see it as a movie. I see it as a series. I see it as a Downton Abbey set in Waikiki. Got it. Got it. So maybe on PBS, let me ask you one last question before we go, Kirby. You are so steep in this important period of Hawaii history and these really larger than life people you've described. And it all happened, really, it all happened here. So why are you not here, Kirby? Why are you not living in Hawaii? This is strange. Okay, I'm going to make a confession. I have found that I don't know if any other writers experienced this, but I write better about Hawaii being away from it because the agony of the loss of not being there makes me a stronger writer. Oh, what a wonderful statement to make. Thank you, Kirby, right? It's really wonderful to talk to you. I'm so glad we connected today. I wish you were in the book and I hope we can connect again. Kirby, are you coming to my book signing in Coco Marina? I hope so. I hope so. Okay. You'll send me an invitation. You have my contact. I got it, man. I appreciate it, man. Thank you, Kirby. Kirby Wright, the author of The Queen of Molokai about his grandmother. What a wonderful discussion. Aloha. Aloha, man. Thanks so much.