From Our Files: July

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.

1979

HONOLULU’s first annual photo contest received more than 4,000 entries. Shown here is the first-place winner in the Experimental—black and white category, “Reflections 1” by Michele Blank. Also in this issue, Halekūlani president and general manager Randy Lee says that, although the low-rise hotel is getting demolished this fall and will reopen as a high-rise in 1981, 85 percent of its rooms are booked for the winter of 1980. “They won’t take no for an answer,” he says. “There’re going to be some sad times for a lot of people once the inevitability of this becomes a reality.”

1979: The average price of a single-family home on Oahu is $120,000. In 2014, the median price paid is $648,000.
 

 1984

“That’s great—now when are you going to stop defacing walls so we can call off the guard dog?”
 

 1994

“Hawaiian women have been more resilient to change and more easily acculturated than their male kin,” Keone Nunes and Scott Whitney write in a story entitled, “The Destruction of the Hawaiian Male.” “Hawaiian men have been marginalized and disempowered by the loss of their own place in the traditional culture.” Since the death of Kamehameha I, a strong leader of cultural, political and religious systems, the writers postulate that no other Hawaiian male had the audacity to live up to Kamehameha the Great’s reputation, and, thus, others took control. “Hawaiian culture was devastated by the abolishment of the kapu and the subsequent introduction of Christianity,” the article says, “but, since that time, more subtle negative effects have been passed down through generations of Hawaiian men,” such as alcoholism and diabetes. In 1990, the suicide rate of Hawaiian men was more than 35 percent greater than that of American males in general. “Hawaiians must find a way to modernize their living standards without Westernizing their thoughts and values.”
 

Learn more about the evolution of covers in Honolulu Magazine and Paradise of the Pacific: 125 Years of Covers, available at shop.honolulumagazine.com.
 

1929	1934	1969

1934: Franklin Delano Roosevelt will be the first U.S. president to visit the Islands this month (if you don’t count Grover Cleveland or Woodrow Wilson, two bears that lived in a private Alewa Heights zoo in 1916). In anticipation, Paradise runs an illustration of FDR on the cover, publishes his itinerary and wishes him a warm “Aloha” from all the people of Hawaii.

1969: Donald Emerson suggests some new swear words, since all the old ones have become trite: “I don’t give a chup,” “I’ve got to take a poox,” “You rotten, dirty mother-zooker!”