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August 16, 2009
Advertiser library photos
Legacy of 50
The imprints contribute to the story of Hawai'i since statehood. From culture to business to politics and beyond, these 50 have helped in myriad ways to define the Aloha State. Since 1959, Hawai'i has been on a path shaped by these key figures and countless others who are no doubt as noteworthy. All have been instrumental to the future of the nation's youngest state. 
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August 16, 2009
442nd RCT
The valor and exploits of the World War II-era 442nd Regimental Combat Team are the stuff of legend: Japanese-American men from Hawai'i and Mainland Japanese-American "katonks" — whose families were imprisoned in Mainland internment camps — came together as an all-Nisei fighting force to become the most highly-decorated unit of its size.
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August 16, 2009
Winona Beamer
She was a teacher, dancer and a storyteller but above all, Winona "Auntie Nona" Beamer was a fervent guardian of Hawaiian culture.
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August 16, 2009
John Bellinger
John Bellinger, who rose from bank teller to the chairman and chief executive officer of First Hawaiian Bank, once attributed the firm's success — and his own — by staying "in your own backyard" and dealing with people you know something about.
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August 16, 2009
John Burns
In the crucial first years that followed statehood, as growth swept over Hawai'i with hurricane force, the architect of change was John A. Burns, who served three terms as governor.
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August 16, 2009
George Chaplin
George Chaplin, the son of East European Jewish immigrants, felt the sting of prejudice in his birthplace of South Carolina and later bucked Hawai'i's powerful, Republican haole establishment to turn around Honolulu's dying morning newspaper as editor of The Honolulu Advertiser.
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August 16, 2009
Jean Charlot
Jean Charlot, who was already a recognized fresco muralist, painter and sculptor when he arrived in Hawai'i in 1949, once said that art should be for the people. Charlot considered himself a "popular artist" and thought of art as nourishment for the masses.
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August 16, 2009
Chinn Ho
By the time Hawai'i became a state, real estate tycoon Chinn Ho had already shattered racial barriers in business, opening the door for Asians who had previously only dreamed of corporate boardrooms. But in 1959, the self-made millionaire had his own new dream: Hawai'i's first high-rise luxury hotel, the Ilikai.
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August 16, 2009
Samuel A. Cooke
As a great-grandson of Anna Rice Cooke, the founder of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Samuel A. Cooke grew up with art.
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August 16, 2009
Frenchy DeSoto
Adelaide Keanuenueokalaninuiamamao "Frenchy" DeSoto had been a janitor from Wai'anae, a patronage employee as a sergeant at arms in the state Senate — who later illegally occupied Kaho'olawe to stop the military bombing of the island — when she became a delegate to the 1978 statewide Constitutional Convention and was suddenly appointed head of the Hawaiian Affairs Committee.
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August 16, 2009
Walter Dods
First Hawaiian Bank was a sleepy institution when Walter Dods started working as its director of advertising and public relations in 1968.
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August 16, 2009
Walter Dillingham
He was known as Hawai'i's greatest builder because Walter Francis Dillingham literally changed the O'ahu landscape.
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August 16, 2009
Joseph Farrington
Joseph Rider Farrington got his start in newspaper journalism at the age of 12, writing a column called “Poultry Pickings” for The Evening Bulletin, a newspaper that would later merge with the Hawaiian Star and would later be run by Farrington as its president and publisher.
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August 16, 2009
Mortimer Feldman
Mortimer Feldman had been a Chicago clothing manufacturer on a 1955 visit to see a buddy in Hawai'i when he decided to retire in the islands. A year later, the clothing company Tori Richard was born.
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August 16, 2009
Frank Fasi
Frank F. Fasi served as mayor of Honolulu for 22 years — a feisty ex-Marine with ideas some considered whacky but were often ahead of their time.
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August 16, 2009
Hiram Fong
He was a Kalihi-born entrepreneur of such enormous drive that he rose from poverty to a seat in the U.S. Senate. In Hiram Fong — a lawyer, tycoon and statesman under five American presidents — Hawai'i's immigrants could always see a shining example of possibility. To them he was a legend.
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August 16, 2009
Don Ho
When he reached national stardom in the 1960s, riding the crest of Hawai'i's tourism boom, entertainer Don Ho became the pop-culture face of a new state.
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August 16, 2009
Dan Inouye
Just a month before Congress agreed to bring Hawai'i into the union, the people of the Islands voted on July 28, 1959, to send Daniel K. Inouye to Washington, D.C. as their first member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
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August 16, 2009
Tom Gill
Tom Gill was a U.S. congressman, Hawai'i's lieutenant governor and a labor attorney, but one principle fueled everything he did: Fairness. It was something he sought in every endeavor.
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August 16, 2009
George Herbig
Even among the 41 faculty at the University of Hawai'i's world-renowned Institute for Astronomy, emeritus professor George Herbig stands out.
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August 16, 2009
Henry J. Kaiser
When industrialist Henry J. Kaiser looked at the open space below Koko Crater in 1959, he saw something else besides 6,000 acres of coral, marsh and lava. He saw a resort community of 50,000 people, an integrated $350 million master-planned development on par with a second city.
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August 16, 2009
Jack Hall
When it came to labor relations with the ILWU and its powerful boss, Jack Hall, it was said that Hawai'i had mellowed in the years immediately after statehood.
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August 16, 2009
Tony Hodges
Tony Hodges essentially kick-started Hawai'i's modern-day environmental movement when he founded the environmental activist group Life of the Land and waged war with corporate developers.
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August 16, 2009
George Helm
He was a gifted musician and falsetto, but George Helm is best remembered for his martyrdom as a leader of the movement to stop military bombing of Kaho'olawe.
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August 16, 2009
Duke Kahanamoku
He was the father of modern surfing and for any man that would be a monumental legacy. But Duke Kahanamoku — Olympic swimming gold medalist, charismatic beachboy and surfer — was something more than mortal. His name was, and remains, as magic to the world as Diamond Head.
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August 16, 2009
George Kanahele
George Kanahele worked to reconcile Hawai'i's conflicting values and was the driving force in a movement to restore a sense of "Hawaiianness" to Waikiki.
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August 16, 2009
Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo'ole
After his death in June 1997, Israel “Bruddah Iz” Kamakawiwo'ole became one of only five people to lie in state in the rotunda of the state Capitol.
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August 16, 2009
Hal 'Aku Head' Lewis
Hal "Aku Head" Lewis developed as much controversy as he did fans as one of the highest paid radio personalities in the world.
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August 16, 2009
Edith Kanaka'ole
Edith Kanaka'ole wrote the history of the Hawaiian renaissance in her native tongue.
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August 16, 2009
Ah Quon McElrath
Ah Quon McElrath dedicated her life to the rights of working people. She was a tireless defender of the underdog whose efforts shaped the history of labor and social justice across the state.
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August 16, 2009
Patsy Mink
At her funeral in 2002, attended by some of the nation's most powerful leaders, Patsy Mink was called a guardian angel for the hopes and dreams of little girls. It was an epitaph to savor.
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August 16, 2009
Tom Moffatt
Tom Moffatt started as a deejay at K-POI radio, and in the five decades that followed, brought some of the biggest acts to the Islands, creating countless memories for generations of Island music and entertainment fans.
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August 16, 2009
Vladimir Ossipoff
It was said in the days right after his death in 1998 that Hawai'i's sense of place owed a debt to outspoken architect Vladimir Ossipoff.
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August 16, 2009
Robert Pfeiffer
He may have been the only corporate chairman of his time who could hula and guide his business through a $400 million capital improvement program. But Robert J. Pfeiffer, who led Alexander & Baldwin and its subsidiary, Matson Navigation Co., for nearly 38 years, was an original.
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August 16, 2009
Outdoor Circle
The Outdoor Circle is best known for getting the Territorial Legislature in 1926 to rid the Islands of billboards.
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August 16, 2009
William Patterson
He was 5 feet 4 and got his first job at age 15 as an office boy with Wells Fargo Bank, earning $25 a month.
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August 16, 2009
Bill Paty
Bill Paty has had a remarkable life and career:
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August 16, 2009
William Quinn
William Francis "Bill" Quinn was not the kind of Republican the people of Hawai'i were used to seeing in the Islands when he became the state's first elected governor in 1959. He was a newcomer, a malahini attorney who had arrived a dozen years earlier and rose quickly on the local Republican scene.
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August 16, 2009
William S. Richardson
Unfettered public access to Hawai'i's beaches has been such an accepted right for so long that it's hard to imagine anything else. But beachgoers owe a debt of gratitude to William S. Richardson, the former chief justice of the Hawai'i Supreme Court whose rulings in the 1960s and '70s sided with a traditional Hawaiian philosophy that beaches and water belonged to everyone.
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August 16, 2009
Rev. Abraham Akaka
There was a time in the life of the Rev. Abraham Akaka when he was the most visible of Hawai'i's people. He was the face of aloha in the modern world.
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August 16, 2009
Bob Sevey
Bob Sevey was a Minnesota-born, Iowa-raised, 1950s-era radio man who for two decades was known as the Walter Cronkite of Hawai'i television.
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August 16, 2009
Mary Pukui
If not for Mary Kawena Pukui, the Hawaiian cultural renaissance of the 1970s might have faltered. When she recognized that the Hawaiian language was being lost, she became the savior of her culture.
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August 16, 2009
Allan F. Saunders
Allan F. Saunders served from 1945 to 1965 at the University of Hawai'i as a political science professor and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, counting future U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink and future U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye among his students.
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August 16, 2009
James Sweeney
Father James Sweeney was named the first bishop of the Diocese of Honolulu in 1941 and went on to contribute to the World War II effort, the Catholic school system, Island parishes and charity organizations during the first 26 years of the newly established diocese.
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August 16, 2009
Roy C. Kelley
In the decade before statehood, guests at Roy C. Kelley's Islander Hotel were quite familiar with low room rates.
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August 16, 2009
Dr. George F. Straub
Dr. George F. Straub immigrated from Germany to Honolulu in 1907, built a 15-room, two-story home at Miller and South Beretania streets and then founded The Clinic in the first floor of his house.
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August 16, 2009
Matsuo Takabuki
During his 21 years at the then-Bishop Estate, Matsuo "Matsy" Takabuki was the estate's most reviled trustee. He also became one of its most beloved.
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August 16, 2009
Nainoa Thompson
Nainoa Thompson spent months staring at the artificial night sky inside the Bishop Museum Planetarium, figuring out how an ancient people used the stars, wind and sea to guide them from Tahiti to an archipelago now known as the Hawaiian Islands.
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August 16, 2009
Donnis Thompson
Donnis Thompson imagined a future that few could foresee in 1972: College campuses alive with female athletes competing just as fiercely as men.
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August 16, 2009
David K. Trask
Over the years, the sprawling Kane'ohe home of David K. Trask Sr. had become the unofficial meeting hall and lu'au grounds for Democrats to gather from around the Islands.
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August 16, 2009
Roy Yamaguchi
Roy Yamaguchi already was an award-winning chef when he brought his style of cooking to Hawai'i in 1988, but his blend of exotic flavors and fresh local ingredients, especially seafood — his "Hawaiian fusion cuisine" — made culinary history.
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Advertisement
Hawaii Statehood Conference
When: Friday, Aug. 21, 2009
Where: Hawaii Convention Center  View map »
Cost: $30 per delegate; $15 per student delegate
Highlights: Top experts discuss the 21st century economy, education for the
next generation, tomorrow's energy, technology in our lives and Native
Hawaiians in a sea of change.
Registration: Online pre-registration ends Monday, Aug. 17, at 5 p.m. After
that, on-site registration at the convention center is available.
Full schedule: View a Full Statehood conference schedule
The Fab 50
 Who do you think are the teams and athletes who made a difference since statehood. Vote, and read our series on major figures who transformed sports in Hawaii. More »
Share your Statehood photo
Daily Historic Photos
Weekly Reader Column
The Advertiser wants your memories of Hawai'i's admission into statehood. We will publish a selection of personal accounts in the newspaper and online. Your reflections could include: • Memories of events leading to statehood or of Admission Day itself. • What statehood has meant to you or your family. • How Hawai'i has benefited — or suffered — under statehood during the past 50 years. • What you miss about Hawai'i from around the time the state entered the union. We are seeking articles of about 500 words or brief vignettes of fewer than 100 words. Articles of other lengths will also be considered. We also welcome photographs that include descriptive information about the photo and when and where it was taken. Send all contributions to 50th@honoluluadvertiser.com. Include your name and a contact phone number or numbers. Only e-mail contributions are being accepted.
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