From Our Files

Our History

In 1888, King Kalakaua issued a royal charter, commissioning a magazine. Then titled Paradise of the Pacific, this publication became HONOLULU Magazine, making it the oldest magazine west of the Mississippi.

1937

“Anyone who has not made this scenic trip by rail around Kaena Point really has not seen Oahu,” reports Edwin North McClellan in Paradise of the Pacific, predecessor to HONOLULU Magazine, on Benjamin Franklin Dillingham’s new railway and bus ride. Each weekend, passengers can board a bus from Waikiki to Haleiwa and hop on an observation railway train to Honolulu, making it the first and only shoreline tour around the island. “To take this trip once may be enough but that one trip will linger long in your memory,” writes McClellan. “It is quite worth while.” Although the rail shut down due to sugar strikes and a 1946 tsunami, the Hawaiian Railway Society revived a portion of the railroad in the 1970s.
 

1952 “To some 100 Hawaiian World War II veterans, all of Japanese ancestry, the visit of Mrs. Nellie Keifer of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, was a cardinal event,” reports Paradise. “While soldiers from Hawaii were stationed in Wisconsin and Minnesota, they were distrusted and unwanted,” said soldier Baron Goto. “[The Keifers] welcomed the Niseis to their home, fed them home-cooked meals, and treated them as equals. This we will never forget!” Ten years later, he and many of “Mrs. Keifer’s boys” chipped in to fly Keifer to Hawaii, where they held a luau in her honor with more than 200 in attendance.

1982 “Lunchtime Culture Break” is a new series of public art and film exhibitions held in the Amfac Plaza Exhibition Room for downtown businessmen and women. “Places and spaces of art like this one are a growing presence in Hawaii,” writes HONOLULU. “They are the workplace galleries.” The incorporation of art in business buildings would become a growing trend in Honolulu with the support of the State Foundation of Culture and the Arts. Among the 15 to 20 workplace galleries, the busiest were found in the entrance lobbies to the Prince Kuhio Federal Building, as well as the Contemporary Arts Center and Davies Pacific Center.