Readers often tell me something that sends me back in time, rummaging around the archives for confirmation of one sort or another.

That was the case this week when two readers set my research gears in motion. One concerned the history of the Spam musubi. The other was about pidgin-­speaking trash cans at Eaton Square.

I know. They’re not exactly earth-shaking topics, but it’s Friday. Maybe some of us could use a respite from the week’s other news. Plus, as we say, inquiring minds want to know!

Who invented Spam musubi?

Keith Fujita told me that his family lived in Waianae, about 35 miles from Honolulu, during the 1950s and ’60s, when only a winding road through the cane fields existed.

“A yearly tradition in my family was a drive around the island. My mom would prepare and pack all of our favorite food from musubi, fried chicken and teriyaki beef. This was before the discovery of Spam musubi.”

I liked his play on words, as if some forgotten archaeologist had discovered Spam musubi, but I did wonder, who came up with the idea?

Spam musubi is very popular in Hawaii, but the term is less than 40 years old (in U.S. newspapers). I set my time machine for the 1980s.

In 1982, Star-Bulletin Food Editor Dianne Conrad wrote about Spam and all the ways we liked it in Hawaii. “Fried Spam with musubi, you know, the kind with the ume (preserved salted plum) in the middle. That’s my favorite,” she confessed.

Joined together as one term, “Spam musubi” first appears in 1987 in an article promoting “Hawaii’s Spam Cookbook,” by author Ann Kondo Corum. It describes them as “rice balls with seaweed wrappers.”

“The creator may have been Mitsuko Kaneshiro, who first made them for her children in 1963,” Corum wrote in “Hawaii’s 2nd Spam Cookbook.”

Kaneshiro started selling them to City Pharmacy on Beretania and Pensacola streets (where Auntie Pasto’s is today).

“Later, she sold musubi to blind vendors to resell at their stands in the municipal building, the downtown post office, the old police station, Circuit Court building, and other office buildings in downtown Honolulu.

“At the peak of her musubi career in the early 1980s, Mrs. Kaneshiro made musubi at her shop, Michan’s Musubi, on the corner of King and Houghtailing streets, delivering almost 500 musubi per day, using her son Ted as the delivery boy.”

The Spam Musubi Maker

The year 1987 also marked the invention of a clear acrylic Spam musubi maker. It was designed by Precision Plastics owner Alvin Okami and his nephew, Jeff.

“My older brother Bob’s wife struggled to make Spam musubi by hand,” Alvin told me. “The Spam was inside the football-shaped rice ball, which then was wrapped with nori.”

Bob suggested they make a rectangular mold, based on the size of a slice of Spam. Alvin and Jeff Okami came up with a machine that heated a round Plexiglas tube and turned it into the desired shape.

“Once word got out, Long’s, Marukai, Holiday Mart, Pay ‘n Save and other stores wanted to carry them, and we ended up selling thousands of them for a few years, until Taiwan flooded the market with cheaper knockoffs.”

Today, Okami and his family make beautiful Koaloha Ukuleles and sell as many as they can make.

Okami’s Spam Musubi Maker was a game-changer. It standardized the shape of Spam musubi and made them easier to mass-­produce.

I talked to Ann Kondo Corum last week to see whether she uncovered anything or anyone new since her books came out. She hadn’t. If readers know more about the early days of Spam musubi, please let me know.

Eaton Square

Did Eaton Square have talking trash cans? That’s the second topic we’ll explore today.

Jason Tittle remembers them. “When you would toss in rubbish, a voice would say something like, ‘For you it’s garbage. To me it’s cash in the bank. Mahalo!’

“This amazed us as kids. We would pick up rubbish and toss it in just to hear it talk. When there was no rubbish, we’d use rocks.

“Eventually we discovered it was motion-­activated, so we’d just wave our hand and it would speak. I think ‘Checkers & Pogo’ did an ‘On the Go’ segment on them.”

There’s an Eaton Square in London. The one I’m writing about today is on Hobron Lane in Waikiki.

The Villa on Eaton Square was developed in 1970 by Jack Magoon (president of Hawaiian Airlines), his cousin Eaton “Bob” Magoon Jr. and Rick Rainalter (who also developed Aloha Tower Marketplace).

The Villa was a 37-story condo. Eaton Square was the shopping and dining area in front of it. King’s Bakery had a branch at Eaton Square, as did Chez Michel. There’s also a Food Pantry that sells Spam musubi and other things.

Eaton Square was named for Bob’s father, Eaton Harry Magoon Sr. Jack Law said the name was inspired by Bob’s friend the dancer and actor Sir Robert Helpmann, who lived in Eaton Square in London.

Bob Magoon wrote the popular songs “Numbah One Day of Christmas” and “Mr. Sun Cho Lee.” He also wrote the stage play “13 Daughters,” about his grandfather Chun Afong, who actually had 12 daughters.

Bob Magoon and Jack Law co-founded Hula’s Bar and Lei Stand in 1974 as well as the Wave Waikiki in 1980.

Talking trash cans?

Could the trash cans there really talk? Yes, and they spoke pidgin! For a while, three brick trash containers contained electronic parts. Honolulu Advertiser journalist Bob Krauss described them in a 1987 article.

“A shopper at Eaton Square in Waikiki wadded up a food wrapper and tossed it into a trash can. There was the sound of a toilet flushing.

“’Watch it, eh?’ said the can. ‘Remember, I inside dees t’ing, you know.’

“Another passer-by threw in a Kleenex. This time a cash register bell rang and the trash can said, ‘Thank you very much. To you, it’s trash. To me, it’s cash in the bank.’”

The Eaton Square rubbish cans may be the only ones in the country, or anywhere else, that talk, Krauss surmised. “There are three of them and keeping them in voice isn’t easy. For the last seven years, they’ve refused to utter a word. We installed them 10 years ago when we opened Eaton Square,” said developer Rick Rainalter.

“You have no idea how much trouble it is getting a garbage can to talk. “The idea came up one night over Irish coffees at the old Territorial Tavern when Eaton Square was about half-­finished.

“The architect, Fred Shutter, and I were trying to figure out how to keep down litter. We decided it would help if the garbage cans thanked people for throwing away their rubbish.”

Rainalter said none of the electrical engineering firms in Honolulu would touch the project, but a friend who ran an electronics store said he’d try to make garbage cans talk.

Fourteen thousand dollars later, he had put together a Rube Goldberg device that would trigger a tape to switch on when rubbish was thrown into the cans.

“Then we needed a voice,” said Rainalter. “Why not have them speak pidgin?” he thought. He picked K.K. Kaumanua, the cowboy­-politician invented by comic Kent Bowman.

What might a garbage can say when people throw rubbish into it? “Play a sound effect,” said Bowman at the recording session. “I’ll say the first thing that comes into my head.” He responded to cowbells, sirens, Chinese gongs and bugle calls.

The comments are what you heard when you throw rubbish into the cans. “At first the cans couldn’t distinguish between cigarette butts and flies, so they were thanking the flies buzzing around,” Rainalter explained.

For the 10th anniversary of Eaton Square, in 1981, Rainalter decided to coax the cans into talking again. The only person he could find to tackle the job was George Losey, professor of zoology at the University of Hawaii, who liked to tinker with electronics.

“The technology has improved tremendously in the last 10 years,” he said. Losey rebuilt it with parts of a burglar alarm on sale at Radio Shack and a telephone answering machine (remember those?).

Kaumanua, in honor of the occasion, recorded some more comments, and passersby at Eaton Square could hear them speaking again for a few months until they fizzled out once more.

“Hallelujah, praise the Lord. Your contribution will help ensure that God’s earth remains clean.”

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Bob Sigall is the author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books. Contact him at Sigall@Yahoo.com or sign up for his free email newsletter at RearviewMirrorInsider.com.