From Our Files: June

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.

1929

Hawaii was considered an “avian desert,” writes Paradise writer Charles Edward Hogue, until five years ago, when former curator of birds for the San Diego Zoological Society, David Johnson, came to the Islands and found no reason a more diverse bird population shouldn’t thrive here. He and a few other “fanatics” “supplied the sinews of war from their private purse” and slowly began importing birds that added charm to paradise with their beautiful plumage and song. In just a year, he introduced 200 species to the Islands, including the North American and Brazilian cardinal grosbeaks and Chinese nightingale, which are flourishing today.
 

“We keep pondering the problems of the president (Richard Nixon) and it always comes back to this: What do you expect from a man who eats catsup on his cottage cheese?”
—HONOLULU Commentary, 1974 
 

1984

Victor Lipman interviews Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask, two years after she proclaimed to The New Yorker that she “hates the haoles with a passion.” Trask tells Lipman that “Any oppressed group will feel resentment against the group that, through racist institutions, keeps them oppressed, away from their resources, away from their past. … The issue is not what I feel about haoles. The issue is about who owns the land.” Throughout the years, Trask has continued to receive heat for her controversial comments, especially as a UH Manoa professor of Hawaiian Studies.
 

1994

UH West Oahu has been serving students since 1976, but it has never had a permanent campus. HONOLULU says that a four-year state campus may be coming to Kapolei in 1998, but some see it as a waste of money. “How can the university announce a $21 million budget cut one week, and then a few weeks later talk about building a new four-year campus at Kapolei?” asks a UH Mānoa faculty member. The community is concerned the quality of Mānoa’s programs will suffer if a new campus is constructed. Basically, no one else in the UH system wants to share their money. “The college was born a bastard child,” says West Oahu’s Dan Boylan. UH West Oahu finally opened its own doors in Kapolei in 2012.
 

Did you know? From 1949 to 1959 Hawaii hosted the 49th State Fair, until Alaska unexpectedly beat Hawaii to statehood by seven months.
 

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

1924	1949	1954