One of Hawaii’s greatest entrepreneurs died last week. Lex Brodie was 98.
When I interviewed him for my first book in 2001, he said he was interested in writing his own book. He never did, but he did tell me his best stories. Even though I’ve written about him twice in this column, there are a few stories I haven’t gotten to yet.
In this week’s column, I thought I’d talk about how he was hired and fired by Dole. It’s a great story and tells you a lot about his character.
Lex was born Alexander Brodie in Kekaha, Kauai, in 1914. His family moved to Honolulu when he was a teenager. Lex was in the first graduating class at Roosevelt High School, and was class president.
Brodie then attended the University of Hawaii where he went out for football "because we got to go on the Mariposa to the mainland and play UCLA and Denver. I had never been to the mainland before."
Lex, who was tall and thin and better built for track, almost didn’t get to go to the mainland.
The week before they were to leave, during practice, a teammate accidentally stepped on Lex’s hand, breaking a bone. Lex said nothing to the coaches, fearing he’d be left in Honolulu.
"I cut a piece of plywood on a jigsaw in the shape of a hand and taped it over my own," Brodie recalled. "It allowed me to play and really helped my blocking."
UH lost to UCLA, then traveled by train to Denver, where many of the players saw snow for the first time, including Brodie.
When the mainland games were over, the team had a week in California before the ship returned to Hawaii. A teammate rented a car and invited Lex to drive with him to San Francisco. There, by chance, Lex met an executive for Castle & Cooke, who offered Lex a job upon graduation.
After college he went to work for Dole, owned by Castle & Cooke. "We called it Hawaiian Pine back then," he added.
Brodie worked at the cannery in 1945 and became the cannery superintendent in 1952. "Jim Dole was a wonderful man," Brodie recalled. "I would brief him when he came each summer. He would spend all day talking with people about their families and kids. He remembered it all and would ask people about their sons in college or how their mothers were doing. He was well loved by the employees."
In 1957 the company decided to make cans instead of buying them. "American Can had us over a barrel. We felt they were holding us up." Lex Brodie argued for hiring the best can makers available, from Germany, but the vice president figured they had all the talent they needed locally.
"When the harvest came in, the cans were of poor quality, but we had to use them," Brodie recalls. "Some would bulge and others would burst. We had to go through the cannery each night and pull them."
Dole didn’t want the press to know, so they trucked the cans at night, covered, to Kapalama and put them on a barge. They dumped them in 2,000 feet of water off Lanai. "We did this weekly for months," Brodie said.
Most of the cans sank, but some of them generated gas and floated to the surface. "They ringed the island of Lanai, landed in Lahaina, Molokai, and some even made it to Windward Oahu," Brodie said.
"We had to send out crews each day to pick them up. The papers never got wind of it, except for a 4-inch article that appeared citing ‘mystery cans’ floating ashore on Oahu." Lex clipped and showed me the article, which never connected the cans to Dole.
"When the vice president returned from a mainland trip, I had to tell him we had lost $6 million that summer. He put his head down on the table. A couple of days later he asked me to sign a letter of resignation. I refused."
"One of us had to take the fall for this," he said. "If you don’t sign, you’ll never work again in this town," he was told. Lex was not intimidated. He said his boss then cried for 20 minutes. "He ranted and raved and then fired me."
Lex knew the Windward City Shopping Center was under construction, and arranged to get the lease on the Chevron Station there. That soon led him to the tire business, and you know that part of the story.
"When I left Dole," Brodie continued, "the International Longshore and Warehouse Union — ILWU — threw me a thank-you banquet at their headquarters. Four hundred people came. They knew I was a fisherman and covered one table with fishing gear — rods, reels, you name it. When I was cannery superintendent, we never once had a serious grievance. The union knew they could call me 24 hours a day. We spotted problems before they happened and fixed it. They appreciated that."
I appreciate all you’ve done for Hawaii, too, Lex. Mahalo, and thank you … very much.
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Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
