 This is Think Tech Hawaii, the immunity matters here. We are so excited, truly excited, down to our depth and breath here, to have Bob Siegel on the show. He writes for the Star Advertiser. He has a rear view mirror column there for a long time, and he has written a number of books. I'm not sure. This is all of them, Bob. They're more than just five books. Okay. Just five. Just five. My house is full of books. I can't publish the sixth until I sell some more. And he writes about Hawaii. He writes about the stories, essentially under our feet, our history, our special history. And we do have a very interesting, fascinating place. And this guy, Bob Siegel, right here with me now today, is one of the guys who has access to stories. I mean, there isn't a conversation you have with Bob Siegel where things don't pop up that you never knew about, never imagined. Well, thank you, Jay. All of the newspaper columnists and reporters have this feedback loop from their readers who keep asking us questions or give us suggestions. And I would have run out of material long ago if it wasn't for them. Yeah. Well, let's talk about, you know, so that other people might do the same in the future. Other people might, you know, dig and find these incredible Hawaii stories, making us unique, giving us a special identity, a persona that no place else in the world has. I mean, you were telling me about Lavash. Lavash is a Hawaii product, a Hawaii creation. It was invented, actually, in Armenia. But it showed up in Hawaii at the Kahala Resort and one of the Maui hotels. In 1964, they decided they needed a signature item that would be on the table when people arrived so they could have it with their cocktails. It would encourage them to drink something. And Lavash is what Martin Weiss, who later found in Swiss Inn, had perfected. That's what I mean. See what I mean? You know, touch any subject and Bob is going to have a story that will draw your attention. I like to poke my nose into things. You know, I like to look under the surface. Like I was just looking at old Longs newspaper ads and I realized every Longs store had a little logo back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Like the one on Hotel Street had a Loha Tower and there was a logo of a tiki for the Longs Polly. And I just went up there yesterday and talked to the manager. It's still there on the sign at the entrance. And it's called Ma'Ola, which was a medicinal god in Hawaiian culture. I'm no kidding. The people there didn't know what it meant or what his name was. But it was still there. And I can look up the old newspaper articles about it. And I, you know, I don't know if anybody would be interested in that kind of thing but me, but I poked my nose into it. And I explored a little bit. I don't know if you know the Longs Polly and Safeway area used to be where the Nuwana YMCA was in the 20s, 30s, 40s. And then it moved a kitty corner across the street. And Longs, the manager told me they have a water seepage problem and they suspect that the swimming pool or the Nuwana YMCA was on their location. That's the kind of miscellaneous we need to know. That's my bread and butter. So let's talk about how you get involved in this. Because, you know, this is not something you're necessarily born with. Things happen in your life to make you focus on this, make you expert on it. What was the process? And I'm asking this because somebody out there will also do it. Well, you know, I consider my life to be totally accidental. You know, I have a master's degree from UH in psychology. I became a therapist in Kailua in 75. But in 1978, a business consulting firm asked me to work with them. And I discovered I enjoyed that. I'd been an entrepreneur all my life from age of eight. I was a tax preparer when I was 15. I had a window washing business all through high school and college. I've never had a nine to five job. So I joined this business consulting firm. And by 1980, I stopped being a therapist. And then HPU came and said, why aren't you teaching at HPU? And I said, I don't know. And so I offered me a position teaching one class a semester in graduate school. And I gave my students an assignment to teach them the value of networking. And they had to go to two networking events, meet six business people, and get one to give them a tour of their business. And they brought me so many interesting stories. It led to this book. And I put everything I had into it. And as soon as I wrote it, people came up to me and they said, you know, I've got a great story. I think you'd love to hear it. And most of the time, they were right. It was a great story. So that led to all these other books. And when book three came out, I walked into the advertiser offices and hoped that they would write a story about book three. And they said, sure. But they also said, how would you like to write an ongoing feature every week in the paper? And I was doing my little happy dance inside. And that was 407 columns ago. So it's every Friday in the business section of the paper. Let me do the math on 400 weeks, 400 weeks. It's almost nine years. Almost nine years. You know, if you predicted in high school, if you had tea leaves or a crystal ball and said, this is what I would be doing, I thought you would be cracked. Because I couldn't imagine this. My life has taken these series of steps because I've paid attention to the opportunities that presented themselves. Well, you know, I asked you before whether the column and the books provided a living for you. And you said, well, you know, in some ways, yes. But bottom line is what you're doing is working for the greater good, aren't you? You're doing this for the community. That was one of my major intentions. Lex Brody wanted to write a book, and he never did. But he sat with me on five occasions and told me all of his stories. And I'm thinking 500 years from now, we will have these stories because of him sitting down and talking to me. And there are many of the books that I've written. So that was one of my major intentions of writing the book. Now, when I've wrote book one and two, we still had a lot of bookstores. And they made a lot of money. So I'm still coasting on that. The bookstores are largely gone. The paper pays a pittance. I'm old enough to get social security. My investments have turned out. So I'm a happy camper. So it strikes me that here in Hawaii, first of all, we have oral history. True. In fact, there's a department at the university. There are people up there who are faculty in oral history. And so a tradition, it's a culture point. And so there must be a very fertile ground for you to do this. You are documenting the oral history. We have Hawaiian myths and legends that have been passed down orally from one generation to another that I occasionally get into. For instance, one of the ones that I like is about Ualaka'a, the state park up on top of Tantalus. You know what Ualaka'a means? Rolling sweet potato. Of course. There was a Hawaiian legend that there were two farmers that grew sweet potatoes, one up the hill and one down the hill. And that's how it got its name. The biggest sweet potato from the farmer up the hill got loose because of a mouse and rolled down the hill. And that's why we call it state park Ualaka'a today. Who would know? But that's the thing. I mean, the stuff that you've come up with in these books and in your columns, and I remember you and I, we met, I think it was on Hawaii Public Radio, came down to a show, and I just sort of discovered you. That has to be 10 years plus. Yes. Over the other, Theo Davies building you were in. I remember down in the basement. Right, right, right, right. So I'm thinking that you have to find it, and maybe you find it from your readers, and they pass you tips and the like, and recollections. I mean, I'm sitting here with you now. I think I could give you some tips, too, because I'm old enough. I'd love to hear it. I've been doing practice law and Bishop Street for a long time. I could give you some tips and not to get me in trouble either. Well, a lot of times a reader asks a question. I can't tell you how many emails I have encountered. I count almost everything, but I haven't counted how many emails I get from readers a month. And one asked me about the Miley Room. I've written about the Kahala Resort, but not specifically about the Miley Room. But I've got a few vignettes. Like Larry Price told me that Aku used to take him there for training when he was a new kid. He called him the kid at KGMB. It really irked him because he was a football player and then a football coach. And here he was being called a kid by who he considered to be a failed violinist, Aku. See how life changes. And so that'll be part of my column on Friday in the paper. And then a friend of mine, Alice Tucker, wrote to me about the lavash at the Miley Room and a few other stories. And about Charlie Goodness, who was the matri-D. Charlie Goodness. Charlie Goodness. Real name. And Charlene was her real name. Charlene Goodness. UH Travel Industry Management graduate, who in her 20s became the head of the Miley Room in the front of the house. So I pulled together lots of things. And I can search all the old papers in the dining out section so I can pull vignettes of what they serve there and what the ambience was in the room decor. So that was my question. I mean, for the benefit of this young hypothetical Mr. Potato Man person who was listening and trying to learn how you do what you do. But how do you find out? You get a tip. You get an issue. You get maybe a place or a person who tips you off on something really interesting. Where do you go from there? The newspaper? You go and say, history, where do you go? Sometimes I start making a list on a computer file of things I can think of that I know about or maybe have written about or have got squirreled away a piece here and there. And then I will go to newspapers.com, which I have a subscription to, and I will search for past issues of the advertiser and star bulletin. And even back to the Hawaiian Gazette and the friend, and depending if we're going back really far. Don Anderson recently from my Rotary Club said to me that he thinks I know more about what was on a given location and before that than anybody else in town. And I thought immediately I could think of 10 people that know more than me. But it dawned on me none of them were going to make a list. And I thought this is my Kuliana. So I started just on my iPad writing down thoughts I had and it went from 10 and now there's 300 locations on Oahu. And that's why I was up at the Longs Polly talking to the manager yesterday about Maola Tiki. You know, years ago Steven Spielberg came up with a program. This is at the beginning of the internet. Maybe, oh gee, the year 2000 or so. It's called Talking Streets. Talking Streets. I'm making a suggestion to you. And you could go, for example, the Lower East Side of Manhattan and there'd be a brass plaque outside a home, an old tenement house. And it had a telephone number on it, a 900-telephone number. And you dial with your cell phone, you dial that number. And it's a radio play relating to this house. Oh, that's interesting. This is where Clara Barton practiced nursing or whatever. And go down the block. There's another one and another one. After a while you have a living tour of what happened in that neighborhood. Well, if you have all these locations here in Hawaii, how hard would it be for using GPS for me to get the stories location? That's a great idea. Don's on me every now and then that we don't have the history of our locations. For instance, the Blaisdell Center doesn't have anything about the war to state. They have several plaques around the site. But none of them are about the ward family that lived there from the 1870s. The children that they had there, the Confederate flag that Queen Lillio Colani made for Curtis Perry Ward that he put over his bed because he was a lonely southern gentleman. And I think maybe that's also my Cooley honor to make sure we do some tags out in space or do something. Recently, somebody said, there are these two pillars in non-Cooley in front of the library. What do you know about them? And I looked into it. There used to be a rest and recreation navy camp during World War II called Camp Andrews. And all that's left are these two pillars. There used to be a sign hanging from them, but it disappeared a long time ago. And I think maybe I'm going to have to twist some people's arms to put brass plaques or maybe it'll be on the internet. Yeah, sure. GPS as I drive by it says to me, there's a story here. See that building? There's a story. You mentioned Spielberg. I've got a Spielberg story that I wrote about and I think my second or my third book. When George Lucas had Star Wars come out, they were afraid it was going to be a bomb in 1980. And so Lucas and Spielberg came to Hawaii and they're playing on the beach. And Spielberg says to Lucas, I wanted to film, I wanted to be the director for one of the broccoli films of James Bond. And they turned me down. They said, no. And he says, I've got something even better. It's about an archeologist who's kind of like a hero type. And I'm calling it Indiana Smith. And he says, I hate that name. He says, well, Smith Jones, I don't care what you call him. Well, I was saying Jones, whatnot. So Indiana Jones got put together conceptually on the beach in Waikiki by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. We have, like I was mentioning to you, the descendants is a story about Hawaii icons, one kind or another. And it was a story written here and all about here. And I'm saying to myself, gee, there was a thousand stories, but I'm wrong. There's a hundred thousand stories. Really, I mean, and will there come a time when I can type out, for example, on my Google type search mechanism, Murphy's Bar. And get your story about Murphy's Bar, which he told me about before the show. Well, everything that I've written about, all 409 of my columns you can find in the Star Advertiser archives. And a few other papers take them and port them over to their websites as well. So, and frequently my columns are free to the public as like a lost leader that the paper uses to get people to subscribe. So, I think everything I've written, you know, when they first hired me and I had book three out at the time, I was afraid I'd run out of material within a couple of years. But, you know, even though I've covered almost everything in these first three books, people have come up to me with more material and they ask me questions and I dig into things and I go to the library and I look up the old papers and I interview people and people come up and nudge me and they say, oh, listen to this. You know, and from there, it's taken on a life of its own. And I think, you know, like my predecessor, Bob Kraus with the papers said the same thing, except in his case, they were phoning him. My readers rarely phone me, although some of them don't have email or text, but some of them do phone me. You might take the call then. He would take phone calls all day long from readers asking him questions and saying, what about this and what do you know about that? Like recently this guy says there's a plaque in front of Azteca restaurant on 12th Avenue and Wiley and it's 1938, it's tucky cow is the Chinese guy's name and Mayor Crane looks like he signed it and it says a dream come true and he says, what's that all about? And I had never heard of that but I looked it up in the old papers and in 1938, this guy opened a store, it was a dream come true. He went to Punahou, he went to Stanford, he went to NYU and got a business degree and he opened up his own store in front of what is now the comic store in the Mexican restaurant. So I keep finding things like that and as long as my readers keep feeding me questions and suggestions, I think I can keep going forever. That must be a big, a fun thing to have readers who feed you questions. It's interactive, you write the column, you get feedback, you get new ideas, you find new issues and it's like, will we ever get to the end of it? Never. Well, I do think the number of stories is finite but I think it's so large. 20, 20 of them. If I'm mining for it, I'm never going to exhaust the good stories in that mine. And I'm picky, I'm not a regular historian, I think I'm a pop historian. I'm looking for the interesting stuff, not everything about it. I wanna find the hot button on a topic and get out. That's the thing about history. You can pick the most interesting things, the things that are somehow relevant today even though they're rooted in history. We're gonna take a short break, Bob Siegel, Rearview Mira and the Stara, Stara Advertiser and who has given great gifts to this community. Oh, thank you. And when we come back, I'm gonna ask him about Pioneer Plaza, this very building. Yes, I don't know if your listeners know where we are but that's where we are. We're in Pioneer Plaza, you're gonna find out more about it in one minute, we'll be back. Hey, Stan the Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii and they won't let me do political commentary so I'm stuck doing energy stuff but I really like energy stuff so I'm gonna keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan the Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're gonna talk about everything energy especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're gonna definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place. Just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan the Energyman, Allah. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m., aloha. Okay, now if you forgot, this is Community Matters and the fellow to my left is Bob Siegel, a columnist for the Star Advertiser who has written a number of books about vignettes of history in Hawaii, loaded with these really valuable things that help us define ourselves, you know? And you can say it's based on interests but it's also based on special characteristics of our state and our culture. It brings people together to know about what you write. Yeah. So I promised before the break that we'd talk about Pioneer Plaza which is where our studio is right now. It's got a history, right? Yeah, we're on the Fort Street Mall. We have King Street above us over this way, Merchant Street behind us over here. We have the Kamehameha 5 post office, first post office in Hawaii, to my left. Pioneer Savings and Loan. Oh yeah. Decided they would buy this property in the 70s and erect the tallest office building was their plan at the time. I think it made it by a couple of inches for a year and then a bigger building superseded it. But the interesting thing for me is that there was something very historic on this site beforehand and Pioneer Plaza kept a remnant of it. There was an alley going from King Street to Merchant Street back in the 1870s called Kuna's Alley. It's now a little arcade of food shops, sushi places and sandwich shops and places like that. But Immanuel Kuna owned the Union Saloon on this property which was like the gentleman's club in Hawaii in its day. The bartenders were very well educated. They would not serve people who were low class or rowdy. King Kala Kala came here frequently. He came to the barber shop for a haircut. He would play poker upstairs. One cute story that I heard yesterday is that he was playing poker with somebody and the guy laid his cards down four aces, the guy said, and the king said, five kings. Wait a minute. That's what the guy said. Wait a minute. There's only four in the deck. He says, well, I have four of them and then I'm the fifth. And then he pulled the pot in his direction and strolled out of the room. You can't leave quickly. Five kings. So that's the story that happened on this site. Yeah, and the A and B building, Alexander and Baldwin just a block away on Bishop. What do you know about that one? Alexander and Baldwin were two friends who went into the sugar business on Maui. They had a pioneer mill at one time was one of their mills, speaking of pioneer. And the interesting thing for me is they were in the business before there were trucks and cars and automobiles and even trains. And so they used water buffalo to pull carts to pull things around on the farm. And reminiscent of that today is Alexander and Baldwin around three sides of their building have these water buffalo heads with the horns coming out, probably about this big each. And I never noticed them until Pam Chambers who's written several books of photographs about downtown Honolulu, took pictures of them and pointed it out to me. What do you know about A and B? Well, I want to tell you a story and you can include it in a future collection if you like and I won't name names, but after the show, I'll be happy to tell you the actual people involved. I used to sit on the stoop of the A and B building and watching the girls go by after lunch. It was a regular evocation. And we sat there with me and this one lawyer and this one accountant rotating the days and we always sat there, we were fixtures. And so much so it gave me the idea that maybe we should have a little prescriptive easement plaque. So we made a, in brass, a prescriptive easement plaque saying, you know, prescriptive rights claimed and I put the names of the people involved and we put the thing on with epoxy. And it sat there, it was not very visible but it was visible to a passerby. Prescriptive easement claimed. That's all it said? Oh, the names of the people. Oh, okay. Okay, the names of the people. I got it. Okay. The three people who sat there, you know, on the stoop. And, you know, a few months went by and then we noticed that some cranes were brought in and A and B decided that they were gonna redo the entire front end of the building and they took off the bench that we used to sit on and they redid it so that you couldn't sit anywhere, really. And of course the plaque came off with it. I always wondered, like for 30 years, I wondered whether there was a connection between the plaque and the construction. You caused it or maybe they kept it in their archive somewhere and they still have it. This is the way they might cut the, you know, prescriptive period, you know, the open hostile notorious use by the public, right? And I met the general counsel of A and B. We were in a restaurant together and I said, you know, I've always wanted to ask you this question. Can you tell me if there was a relationship? And I knew him and he said, yes, Jay, of course there was a relationship. That's why we tore the face up. Yes, we spent millions of dollars because of your $50 plaque. Yes, exactly. We could have taken the plaque off but that would have been too easy. That would have been too easy. But there you have it. See, a little piece of history that I can tell you about. I've got a newsletter that I send out to 500 subscribers on midweek. It's an email newsletter called Rearview Mirror Insider for people who want more information behind the scenes information. I'll put that story in there. Go for it. I can give you more detail if you like. Okay, yeah, you have a picture of it. I'd like that too. Oh gosh, I wish I did. And that's a problem, isn't it? Because some of these stories, you want to have a picture and maybe you can find an old picture hither and yon but maybe not. What do you do when you can't find it? Well, we've got tremendous resources. The paper has half a million pictures. The study archives, Bishop Museum, Hawaiian Historical Society, all the old newspapers sometimes have drawings or recreations. I can't reproduce them really well, but I can use those. Sometimes I go out like I was telling you about Long's Poly. I was taking a picture of it with my phone yesterday of the tiki on top of their sign. Yeah, yeah. It's everywhere and it's so valuable and it's really worth knowing about because it defines us. And so you gave me a list of possible areas. I mean, there are many, many of them and I'm just pinning the tail on the story there, okay? Sure. What hospital was once called the Honolulu Home for the Incurables? Who was its most famous patient, Bob? Well, it was Neil Blaisdell was the famous patient. He had tuberculosis and it was Leahi Hospital. There was a fire in Chinatown in January of 1900 and people either went east or west and the ones that went to the east kind of formed an encampment around south and Queen Street and eventually they all found places to live except for the most ill of the group and they kind of built a hospital around those people and it focused on tuberculosis and other communicable diseases at one point around 1900 and then it moved to its current location and they called it the Honolulu Home for the Incurables. Can you imagine if you're a patient and good news we've got a hospital for you? That's something where you wanna invite your family to come and say hi. No, not exactly. But the reason they changed the name was not that it had a stigma that they didn't like but because they started, they found cures for tuberculosis and a lot of people were leaving cured. Now, Neil Blaisdell was a football coach and a baseball coach in Hawaii. He had played baseball for the Baltimore Orioles in 1926. He'd have been a quarterback for UH in the 1920s and he came down with TB and he had plenty of time to sit around. He thought he could give more to the community and for nine months he considered and he ran for the State House of Representatives, lost and then he ran for it again in one and then he ran six times in one as mayor and I remember reading about him in the paper that he did 400 sit-ups today and I think, who cares how many sit-ups the mayor does? But that's what they would write about in the papers in the 60s. You know, this is all a study of free association, isn't it? I mean, it's like you are a database, an information database and I can activate you by just throwing words at you. I don't have to read these questions. I can throw words at you. I don't throw word at you, okay? Because I remember reading about this some time ago and I thought it was... Swing and a miss. Swing and a miss. Let's see if you can do this one. The Kaimukki and the tram. Well, we used to have a trolley, electric trolley that ran all the way to Cocoa Head Avenue. By the way, the people that developed Kaimukki were never successful until the Chinatown Fire, which we were just talking about. They had developed Kaimukki in the 1890s. It was too far away from town and so they were not making any money. The lots were $500 for an acre on Waili Avenue in the 1890s. We could go back now. And then 6,000 people lost their homes in Chinatown and they needed new places to go and when they rebuilt Chinatown, it was not for housing, it was for stores. And so a lot of them went to Kaimukki and that's when it had a resurgence. By the way, at the end of 12th Avenue where Lillio Kalani Elementary School used to be a zoo that they created to bring people out to see the end of the trolley line. Anything to sell some property. Yeah, and they had a zebra out there and when it rained, they discovered the zebra was really a donkey that had been painted. I'm so glad I asked. Now that was unrehearsed. I just threw a word at Bob. I was actually nervous that whether I could answer that or not. I think you did really wonderful. So Bob, you know, as I say, it's the free association kind of thing and inherent in free association is creativity. And so this is a really creative thing and an application that you've selected that you've developed that's a great contribution to us. It's really fun for me to do. Oh, I can imagine, I can see that. And the people who watch this tape be looking at your face, they'll be able to see that too. And I can only say that we need to have you back again. Sure. And we need to look at the rest of these 200 questions and the rest of the books and sort of engage in the Hawaii that we need to know about because it is our Hawaii, it belongs to us. And you give us that gift. You know, I think that what I'm looking for are stories that give a deeper meaning to the things we take for granted. You know, I think that the people that drive into Long's Polly today who are listening to this show are gonna look and see that tiki and they're gonna think, how come I never noticed that tiki? It's been there for 40 years practically and they may never have paid attention and now they're going to. And it will give them a deeper meaning and they may think that, you know, maybe the swimming pool was where Long's is and that's why they have a water problem in their basement. Never see Long's in the same light again. You know, it's how come I never noticed this? How come I never knew this before? Thank you so much, Bob Segel. Thank you, Jay. It's great to be with you. Aloha.