 and land in Hawaii. Today we'll be speaking with Judge Bill Fernandez from Kapa'a, Kauai. He attended Kamehameha School and Stanford University. He is a former Superior Court Judge and Mayor in Sunnyville, California. Understand that it is twice the size of Kauai. He was also the Director of the County Water Commission and served on the City Council there. He was also in the Air Force Reserve. He has written many books telling stories of old Kapa'a Town and Hawaiian history as well as novels. He has returned to his hometown with his wife Judith and can often be seen walking the Kapa'a by path by Fuji Beach with friends Dilip Baal and Caroline Miriam. Bill, welcome to Tink Tak, Kauai. Aloha, Kōno'ila, Dennis. Mahalo. Yeah. Bill, please tell us a little more about your background starting from small kid time in Kapa'a. Well, I was a barefoot boy. I didn't know much. We didn't have much money when I was growing up. You had to make everything you wanted to play with. I love to tell the tin canoes story where you'd get old sheet metal and you had the wrinkles all taken out and then you curved it up like you would a half a tin can and you put a bow and a bow, a wooden bow and then you went out into the ocean with your tin can and that's a real adventure when you're trying to deal with waves on a sitting on a tin can without a keel and paddling it along. But that's the way we lived. We made everything we played with when I was a child and all of us, all of the guys I knew, we did a little fishing. You always have to either spear manini or inalaya and get something to eat. So that was the early life that we led. Things have changed quite a bit. Yeah, I was a little kid. I did much of the same things. Little kid growing up in Alimano then I moved to Kapao Homes here. I used to go to Roxy Theater to watch Japanese movies once in a while with my grandpa. I also went to the dentist there but I did not know much of the interesting history. Can you tell us a little bit about the Roxy Theater story? Well, my father was a showman. He would travel around the different islands and he would show his movies. He kind of rent a hall or pitch a tent and he would show his movies in very plantation towns and he always wanted to have his own movie theater. And back then, and I'm talking about the 1930s, all the land was controlled by the plantations. So in order for my father to buy a plot of ground on the town of Kapao, he had to see the great white father to get permission to buy an acre of land for $10,000 and had to promise that he would show a whole some movies. So he acquired the land in 1936 and it took him about two years to plan his theater, two and a half years really. And the Roxy Theater opened in 1939 and it was state-of-the-art 1,100 seats. But you know, Kauai was a small place. You know, 30,000 people for the whole island and you really couldn't fill a 1,100 seat theater. It was it was again state-of-the-art, beautiful screen, great stereo sound. However, by June, July 1941, my father said, I'm going bankrupt. You can't pay the mortgage on the theater, which was $40,000. So we were going to lose everything we had and unfortunately the war came along, but it was also fortunate in a sense that martial law was imposed and there was no civil court, so you couldn't have any civil proceedings. And what really saved the Roxy Theater was the fact that there would be some a whole division of troops from New York, the Fighting 69, that was the regiment of the Rainbow Division, was set in Kapa and behind the safely giant mountain. And when the martial law relieved the use of civilian facilities like movie theaters, shops, bars, we were able to open the doors to all the servicemen. And before you know it, the most popular place in town was the Roxy Theater. You would have 1,100 people there every Saturday and Sunday watching the movies. Most of them were GIs. So it saved my father from losing the theater and kind of helped us, my mother, sister and I, to finally get an education, but never gone to Stanford without the Roxy Theater. Yeah, well, you mentioned they had the military in the back of Sleeping Giant, you know where exactly it was? Well, it was way back up towards Waiali Mountain. So that's where the house, they had about 15,000 soldiers there in jungle training that were being trained for jungle warfare, primarily in the Philippines, but I think New Guinea was a factor in that training that they went through. So we were very much controlled by the military and during the Second World War. Yeah, I was a little bit before my time. You weren't even born yet. You didn't know that it was barbed wire along all these beaches on Kauai. You couldn't go fishing. One of my uncles was in the barbed wire gang that most people on the island don't know about barbed wire gang. So you mentioned the rainbow division. Is that the wakeful that rainbows over Kapa? You had a boat? No, no, no. Rainbows over Kapa does not have to do with the division. The idea of rainbows is this Kapa Town was really, because of the war, was a gold mine for lots of what you call lower middle class businesses, like my father. My father was lower middle class business and then there were others like George Kondo's Coca-Cola shop and I can name a few others, but we were able to profit from the war and that's why when I wrote the book Rainbows Over Kapa, you know, before the war, you struggled. You really did to make a living, but when the war came and you had a lot of money coming into the islands, people had money to deal with and so it's like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to have had a successful business in Kapa Town because of the war. So you got rainbows over Kapa and some other books. Can you tell us what are some of the other books, like Kauai Kid? Well, Kauai Kid tells you the story of how us young people grew up. Now, you have to remember Dennis, you may not have been alive at the time, but Kauai was surrounded by sugarcane fields and then there was a pineapple field so that there were many places you couldn't go that were what they call kapu, don't enter. And you know, the interesting thing about the plantations is they didn't care about the people. I mean, I don't know if you ever remember the time when there were Sabodong signs, they would spray the cane fields with DDT. So anyway, I'm straying a little bit from the story, but it's important to know that we were very confined as children. We were confined to the beach and we were confined to the streams that might have gone by near where we lived. But the cane fields, it was Sabodong, poisonous. You stayed out of it. So from my standpoint, when you look at Kauai kids and the picture of the ocean, this is the place where we lived out here in the sea during my time growing up. And the people who lived on Kauai again had to deal with the plantation restrictions as to where we could go from either for holo-holo, meaning go around some place for a holiday or where we could be safe. And the safest place was the ocean, which was taken away from us by the war because they put barbed wire along all of the beaches. Yeah, well, I was born in 1951, so I missed the war, but that was my dad's time. He went to college, started circuit technology to work in the plantation, but due to discrimination, he left and farmed on his own. So we lived, close to the beach, we ate Manini, Nenui, or meals. Yeah, you know all about that, yeah. I know all about that, my dentist. I mean, things didn't change that much after the war, but we were still in a plantation economy. Yeah, at that time, they had some places that had pineapples and still had sugarcane. There was a whole different era. So with some other books, you got one about King Kamehameha and the Splitted Paddle. Can you tell us about that story? Well, I have several books about Kamehameha. The first one is Splitted Paddle, which tells the story of the beginning of his conquest of the islands. He was really on the big island of Hawaii for eight years, by the way. He tried with wood spears and bone clubs and shark teeth to try to win the island, but until the Haleys brought guns, he couldn't make a headway. I mean, I'm talking about eight years. So Splitted Paddle tells you the story of how he finally conquered Hawaii Island and his many battles on that island, and also on the island of Maui, because he was into the conquest approach. So he did conquer Maui, and then he lost Maui, and he was back in Hawaii Island. So that is Splitted Paddle, when he finally took control of Hawaii Island. And then the next one is Conquest, which tells the story of how he finally conquered every island but knee-how. And if you see the picture of the book Conquest in the front cover, we'll show you the end game, the Battle of Nuanu, where King Kamehameha, the conqueror of the islands, became a famous hero one day. He fought a native army, and he pushed them over the Pali, and said, awwe, anohie, awwe, anohie, goodbye farewell. And they found all these, when they built the new Pali highway, they found all these hundreds and hundreds of skeletons of soldiers that had been pushed over the cliffs and died. So that is Conquest. And then the follow-up book is End of the Gods, which tells the story where after Kamehameha passes away, where Kahumano, a woman, said, I am so angry at being told I can't go to the temple and meet with the other chiefs. I'm so angry because I'm restricted in the food I can eat. I'm so angry because I can't sleep where the men sleep. So she fostered a revolution with help and brought down what's called the kapu system, a bunch of nono rules that could be made on a spur of the moment by a chief or a priest. Kapu means no, no. And you break a kapu rule, you die. So, I mean, that's the story. I'll call it the end of the Kamehameha story because the kapu system was so much a part of the control system of the Hawaiians. But I love to tell stories about the past so people can understand how Hawaiians had to overcome a lot of difficulties as Native people. And I don't know if people are into, you know, reading about revolutions, but revolutions have changed the life of a lot of people. America is one example and there are others. I'm just reading a book about Cuba and the 1956 revolution in Cuba that freed the people of Cubans from the capitalism of America. So anyway, I diverted a little bit from So what about the Splintered Battle? Well, Splintered Battle, I told you a little earlier, is about how Kamehameha conquered the island of Hawaii. And the reason that showed Splintered Battle is because Kamehameha, when he was going through his attempts to win the island, saw a bunch of fishermen on the shore. So he wanted to grab their fish. But then he got his foot stuck in the coral and the fishermen said, okay, you are going to kill us. We're going to get you. And they pounded his head with a paddle and it splintered. And the reason I felt that was to talk about it was Kamehameha learned a big lesson from it because later on he came up with a law, which is the primary law in Hawaii. You must take care of the old. You must take care of the people that are helpless and allow them to sleep and live in peace. That's a law from Kamehameha back in 17, I don't remember exactly about 1775, 76. So it's a primary law in Hawaii. So anyway, I bring out these stories because it has a lot of relevance to what's going on in Hawaii. That was, do it, Fernandez. I mean, Bill's boss. You got a book on the PPA massacre also on the island. It's terrorism and paradise. And I think, you know, this is the book, terrorism and paradise. And you have to understand, all of us have to understand that when you were living here, even in the 1930s, and in the 1920s, and even earlier, we were strictly under the control of a plantation economy and a plantation power structure. And that power structure, which is a minority of the people, controlled the entire islands. The plantations brought in different races to work in the plantation fields. Now, this might be interesting to the Japanese, because the Japanese people were a little smarter than the Hawaiians, I have to say, because they started to say, you know, we need to have better wages. We need to have better working conditions. And let's talk about that. When you were working in the plantations, you didn't really have a living wage, and you worked six days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day. Okay. So the Japanese had a strike in 1920, and it was a six-month strike, and it really hurt the plantation. So they brought in Filipinos that were to be strike breakers. All right. Now, they settled that strike, and Malapit, who was the union leader of the Filipinos. And by the way, let's talk about those people first. The plantations were really canny, very smart. They brought in illiterates. People, the workers who did not know how to read or to write, and Malapit kind of lied, and he got on the boat that came here, but he was an attorney, and he was a, so he became a union leader for the Filipinos. So now he says, okay, let's go strike. What did they want? $2 a month more, and an eight-hour day. Plantations said, no way. We're going to bring in Visayan. Okay, you have to remember that in the Philippines, there was tribal. You had Ilocanos, Visayans, and other people. The first Filipinos here were Ilocano. Now you're bringing Visayan in the 20s to be strike breakers. So what happened was two Visayan young men were walking into Honepepe town, I believe to get some shoes, and the strike breakers who were Ilocano, they'd been out for about six months, and you understand, they were trying to get a couple of dollars a month more and an eight-hour day. The Ilocanos grabbed those two Visayan boys and held them. The sheriff was told about that, so they came over, and a sheriff came over to the school house where everybody was confined, and he says, you've got to release these kids to me. No, no, no, no, no, no, said the strike breakers. So what he does, he goes back and he gets a warrant, and he gets the plantation people to arm something like 40 men, I mean, rifled armed, and he went back with three deputies with a warrant for the arrest of the two boys. He gets the two boys, he starts out, and they, you know, they strike breakers say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, there's something wrong here. And so they came out of the school house, and that's when the massacre occurred. The shooting started. No one knows who fired the first shot, but when it was all over, you had 17 Filipinos dead, four policemen, and a lot wounded. So the importance of the massacre for everybody is to understand that we were a feudal society here. You had the rich oligarchs, no different than in Russia, you had the oligarchs that had complete control over the economy and the politics. And you had the servants who were close to being slaves. And that's what Hawaii was like even during the time I grew up. So it's important to understand what the massacre is all about. When you talk about land ownership, unfortunately, our Hawaiian kids were very ignorant about land, and they gave the hollies, meaning, you know, the plantation types, all the land that they wanted literally for free. So that when the, when the time came for people like my father to get a piece of property, he had to go big. You know, it wasn't just $10,000, that's what he paid for it. It was, you got to tell me what you're going to do before we let the property go, because they wanted to have the oligarchs wanted to have control over every aspect of the economy. So anyway, you know, that's why I write these stories. So you understand that, and I'm not a revolutionary, I'm just saying, well, you know, again, if you read, I don't know if anybody's ever the story of the Cuban revolution, but there's an agricultural society that was controlled very much like the control that was exercised in Hawaii. Yeah, thanks. That's very educational too. Yeah, you've come a long way from shining shoes and selling cigarettes. You remember my stories about being a gopher boy for the soldiers. Yeah, yeah, to, you know, to judge. And what eight years ago, I guess you're president of Hawaii Historical Society, and you put on a great show at the spits at Wailui was some of the best local musical talent, a model for that. Yeah, we are running out of time. Any last words you want to say about old Hawaii or Hawaii? Well, number one, I really believe that this is a great place to live in. It's a great place to live in because we were a lot freer than we were during the plantation era. You know, I have to respect the leadership that's come into the islands from all color for the immigrants that came here to work in the plantations that leadership has provided more and more freedom for all the people to live a better life. And that to me is the most important aspect of living on Kapa Town, comparing it to the past and what I know it's like now. Yeah, thank you very much, Jobs Bill Fernandez. Mahalo to our guest, Jobs Bill Fernandez. Mahalo to our viewers on ThinkTech Hawaii. If you like the ThinkTech free media shows, please help support this non-profit platform with a donation. Aloha, a hui hou, ma la ma bono.