Readers of this column know I like to go off on tangents. It’s the opposite of what most of my English teachers said to do, but I enjoy getting off the beaten path. Hopefully you will enjoy it, too.
A few weeks ago I wrote about a man who flew a small crop-duster biplane under the Kalihiwai Bridge on Kauai. It reminded at least one reader of the bridge over the Wailuku River in Hilo.
Some locals call it “airplane bridge” because when a car travels over its steel slats, the sound resembles a propeller airplane.
The reader, who calls himself Pono Ako, said the bridge was just two blocks away from a famous hardware store in Hilo that was owned by Pete C. Beamer.
Beamer is a well-known Hawaii island name, and Pete Beamer was related to several generations of musicians and kumu hula. He was the patriarch of that ohana, and until this week I knew nothing about this fascinating man.
Stowaway
Pete Beamer was born in Wabash, Ind., in 1871. In his youth he spent a year traveling from Indiana to Mexico on the kind of bone-shaking bicycle that was made in the 1880s.
He spent another year bicycling from New York to California. Beamer sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu in 1899. His passage cost him $15, given to the steward who smuggled him aboard and surreptitiously fed him.
Mauna Loa was erupting at the time, and he came to see it. He missed his return ship and ended up staying in Hilo. He introduced the bicycle to the Big Island, and it became so popular that Beamer went into business repairing them in 1901.
His shop also sold bicycle parts, buggy whips, roller skates, popcorn poppers, curling irons and fishhooks. You could find nearly anything in Pete Beamer’s Hardware Store.
PC Beamer
The store’s official name seems to have been PC Beamer, and its slogan was “The finest tool and hardware store in Hawaii.”
Others called it the “red front store,” since it was painted red. Its address on the Hilo bayfront was 110 Kamehameha Ave.
“When I was a very young kid growing up in Hilo in the 1950s, I would occasionally venture into that store just to stare into yesteryear,” Pono Ako said.
“The store was so old that it still had its original wood floors and a high ceiling since there was no second story then.
“Skylights allowed the sunlight to stream into the store, and it was like the light from the heavens was flooding the store. Ancient bicycles and other old items hung down from the rafters on ropes and chains.
“It was always a great adventure whenever I dared to go into that mystical place. Entering that store was like entering the past. Even old man Beamer seemed like someone from another century. He always wore suspenders to hold up his trousers and had old glasses perched on his nose.
“He was very tall — at least 6 feet, 1 inch — and had a gruff, unsmiling disposition but always tolerated this innocent, wide-eyed, young kid venturing into his domain and never buying anything. He died at age 95 in 1967, and unfortunately, his store closed.
“Now whenever I encounter ki hoalu (slack key guitar) master Keola Beamer, we reminisce about his great- grandfather’s old store on the Hilo bayfront and the feelings the store invoked in us.”
Jack London
The Honolulu Advertiser’s Bob Krauss wrote about the store in 1995, when he discovered that the famous author Jack London (“The Call of the Wild”) had been a customer of Beamer’s in 1912.
“During Jack and Charmian London’s visit on the Big Island they stayed with the grandparents of Roy Blackshear, an heir by marriage of the palatial Shipman Estate at Keaau.
“London broke something on the rudder of his yacht, ‘Snark,’ so Grandpa Shipman advised he go to Pete Beamer’s Hardware Store.
“Does he have spare parts for rudders?” asked London. “He’s got everything,” answered Shipman.
“Sure enough, Pete Beamer found a spare part for Jack London’s rudder. A few days later, they sailed away.”
Three Wonders
Pete Beamer called it the Store of Three Wonders:
“You wonder if we have it.
We wonder where it is.
Everybody wonders how we found it.”
Jaggarmobile
Krauss moved the story ahead 16 years to 1928. “Pete Beamer had more junk in his store than ever.
“It was at this time that Dr. Thomas Jaggar, the pioneer vulcanologist who founded the observatory at Kilauea Crater, invented an amphibious vehicle that could drive on land and cruise in the water.”
When Jaggar launched it for a trial run, something on the rudder broke. The only place that might possibly have had the part was Pete Beamer’s Hardware Store.
Beamer asked him to draw a sketch of it. Jaggar did. “I’ve got one of those somewhere,” said Beamer. He found it in a back drawer.
Amazed, Jaggar asked, “Why do you carry a part like this?”
Beamer explained, “Jack London needed the same one. I always order two.”
Colt pistol
“Now we jump ahead to 1946,” Krauss continued. “Roy Blackshear broke a spring on an 1848 Colt pistol. ‘Maybe the Honolulu Iron Works can fabricate a new one,’ a friend advised.
“‘I’ll try Pete Beamer first,’ said Roy. He asked Beamer if he had a spring for the Colt pistol. Beamer said, ‘Show me the pieces.’
“Beamer rummaged in the back of a long, dusty drawer. ‘Ahhhh, here it is,’ he said, holding up the spring with a tag hanging from it.
“Roy couldn’t believe it. ‘By golly, you found one. How much is it?’ ‘What does the tag say,’ Pete Beamer asked. ‘Five cents.’ ‘All right, give me a nickel.’”
Hale Huki
Pete Beamer met and married Helen Desha, a gracious, charming and handsome woman of part-Hawaiian heritage and member of a prominent family, Maxine Hughes wrote in the Hilo Tribune Herald in 1967.
“She was a talented musician and composer. She not only taught her own children, but numerous other Hilo youngsters hula and music.
“Their home, Hale Huki, on the banks of the Wailuku River in Puueo, was a famous gathering place over the years for people to enjoy the Beamer family’s well-known Hawaiian hospitality.”
Newspaper columnist William Drury visited him in 1960. He wrote, “Pete Beamer at 88 is an alert, active, weather-beaten, cigar-chewing old-timer. He looks astonishingly like a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.
“Leaving the store in charge of his Hawaiian Japanese assistant, Ken Niimi, who had been with him for 44 years, he took me to his large old house on the rim of that magnificent gorge through which runs the Wailuku River.
“It is cool and airy, a museum of memories, crowded with pictures and sentimental treasures.”
Gave us a dollar
Keola and Kapono Beamer performed together at the Territorial Tavern in the 1970s. Honolulu Magazine listed their “Honolulu City Lights” as the No. 1 of “50 Greatest Hawaii Albums of All Time.”
Keola Beamer said, “My brother, Kapono, and I were just little kids, and my grandmother (Louise Beamer) took us to say hi to our great-grandfather, who gave us each a dollar.
“He got so old, he’d leave his beat-up old station wagon in the middle of the street and the cops would park it for him.”
William Drury said Pete Beamer was “one of the oldest, most respected and best-loved of Hilo’s citizens.”
The shop owner returned the favor. “Hilo is the best damn place in the world to live. I know, ’cause I’ve been everywhere.”
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.
