This year in Rearview Mirror, we learned about a pilot who flew his plane under a Kauai bridge, we looked into the writing of the song “Mr. Sun Cho Lee,” by Bob Magoon and the Beamer brothers, and we learned about a buoy off Waikiki that was painted pink in protest.
We looked into memorable island coaches and doctors, and how McKinley High School swimmers helped the U.S. win the 1952 Olympic medal count.
Last week I discussed some of my favorite stories of the year. Here’s Part 2.
Spam musubi
In Hawaii, islanders consume thousands of Spam musubi a day. This year I looked into its history and found it is much shorter than I had imagined.
The term “Spam musubi” first appeared in 1987 in Ann Kondo Corum’s “Hawaii’s 2nd Spam Cookbook.” It describes the food as “rice balls with seaweed wrappers.”
Corum said the creator may have been Mitsuko Kaneshiro, who first made them for her children, then started selling them out of City Pharmacy on Beretania and Pensacola streets.
By the early 1980s she was selling 500 a day from her own shop, Michan’s Musubi.
In 1987, Alvin Okami produced the first acrylic Spam musubi maker. They sold at Longs, Marukai, Holiday Mart and other stores for $3-$5. He said they sold like hotcakes, until a company in Taiwan brought them in at such a low cost he couldn’t compete.
Can’t fight without kimchi?
Let’s stay on the topic of food. This year Rearview Mirror waded into the depths of kimchi.
In 1966 during the Vietnam War, one of our allies, the Republic of Korea, sent a division to back up the U.S., but there was a problem: The Koreans couldn’t fight without kimchi, and Korea had no kimchi canning facilities. Families made their own kimchi at home.
This led U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye to suggest that Hawaii could help. “Koreans can no more be expected to fight well without kimchi than Irishmen could be expected to go into battle without corned beef and cabbage.”
Our local distributors — Joe Kim’s and Halms — said they could step up production.
Deep kimchi? I plumbed the depths and found that the term first appeared in print in 1980. It was used at the Pentagon to describe a military quagmire an army could get into.
First Interstate Bank used the term in one of its 1984 ads. The headline said their loans will “get you out of deep kimchi.”
Hawaii Regional Cuisine
At Emme Tomimbang’s memorial this year, Roy Yamaguchi, Chuck Furuya and Alan Wong credited her with coming up with the concept of naming and showcasing what would be called Hawaii Regional Cuisine.
It began in 1991, when a dozen chefs gathered for a weekend at the Maui Prince Hotel. “We formed the group as a fraternity of sorts, as an opportunity to exchange information with peers,” said Peter Merriman. “It grew into something much larger than we envisioned.
“The movement began with chefs buying from local farmers, guaranteeing farmers buyers for their crops and ensuring the chefs a supply of the freshest- possible local ingredients, such as Nalo Greens by Dean Okimoto’s family farm.”
Some of the other chefs involved included Sam Choy, Jean-Marie Josselin (A Pacific Cafe), Philippe Padovani (Manele Bay Hotel), Bev Gannon (Hali‘imaile General Store) and George Mavrothalassitis (La Mer). Tomimbang and Shep Gordon helped keep the group focused.
What brand should we use to promote Hawaii cuisine? Don Chapman said the chef’s list of possible brand names considered included Pacific Rim, Pan-Asian, Hawaiian Moderne, Nouvelle Hawaiian, Pacific Cuisine and New Da Kine Grinds. Noel Trainor at the Hilton Hawaiian Village liked “Nouvelle Kau Kau.”
“Here in Hawaii we have a rich culinary heritage, shaped by an abundance of fresh produce, wonderful seafood and marvelous ethnic recipes,” Trainor said.
Executive chef Gary Strehl at the Hawaii Prince Hotel said, “Whatever it is called, the culinary style is a melding of styles from the East and West. It takes advantage of local ingredients, and cooking traditions from both Western and Eastern cultures.”
Strehl suggested this style could be called Hawaii Regional Cuisine, and the group coalesced around that brand.
Pete Beamer
I have often found, when it comes to neighbor island communities, that Hilo often has great stories. One I was introduced to this year was about Pete C. Beamer and his famous hardware store in Hilo.
Beamer is a well-known Hawaii island name, with several generations of musicians and kumu hula. Pete Beamer was the patriarch of that ohana, and until this year I knew nothing about this fascinating man.
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.
Beamer bicycled from New York to California, then sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu in 1899. Mauna Loa was erupting at the time, and he came to see it. He missed his return passage 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.
Its official name seems to have been “PC Beamer.” Others called it the “Red Front Store,” since it was painted red. 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.”
Beamer met and married Helen Desha, a gracious, charming and handsome woman of part-Hawaiian heritage and member of a prominent family.
Slack-key guitarist 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.”
Other 2024 discoveries
>> The term “coconut wireless” dates in the newspapers to 1929 when a traveling reporter used it to describe the rumor mill in Tahiti.
>> Driver’s licenses in Hawaii at one time were made of paper, had no photo of the licensee, were good for any motor vehicle and were for a lifetime. They never expired.
>> The site where Kaimuki Middle now sits once held six other schools: Honolulu School for Boys, Honolulu Military Academy, the Punahou Farm school, Pohukaina School and the McKinley Annex school, which became Kaimuki High School.
>> Former Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s first car was a 1937 Buick Coupe, purchased from Lippy Espinda for $50. It came with “one warranty,” Espinda said.
“You get the car from me. You hit the road. I’m gonna be watching you going down Kalakaua Avenue. And as long as Lippy can see you down Kalakaua Avenue, you got da warranty.”
Don’t worry that we’ll run out of material. I have a long list of things to write about in 2025, such as the golf course that almost occupied much of Kalihi Valley and the two peninsulas that were proposed off Waikiki to create space for more hotels and beaches.
We’ll compare school proms today with those in the past. Then, we’ll explore the amazing life of aviator Charles Lindbergh on Maui. We’ll also look into some of the greatest and most expensive practical jokes ever played in Hawaii, and the jokesters who created them.
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.
