The first television broadcast to residents of Hawai‘i occurred on Dec. 1, 1952, the day Honolulu’s KGMB-TV Channel 9 began broadcasting a regular daily telecasting schedule.
On Kaua‘i, the first TV reception seen and heard was a cowboy show, which appeared on the television screen of Lihu‘e Plantation manager Caleb Burns at Iliahi, his house in the hills above Lihue, shortly after 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 9, 1952.
And, the first person to see that cowboy show was Burns’ cook, Satoru Tanaka.
During 1953, the Kalaheo-Lawa‘i area had the best television reception on Kaua‘i, where there were about 20 TV sets, around half of the estimated 40 sets on the island.
In Lihu‘e, TV reception was fair to good some nights, poor on other nights.
Reception in upper Wailua varied from good to poor.
There were no TV sets beyond Kapa‘a going north, or west of the Kalaheo-Lawa‘i area due to very poor reception.
Generally speaking, Kaua‘i residents preferred to wait until reception improved before buying a TV set.
Television reception remained chronically snowy for most Kaua‘i viewers until April 1960, after Jack Wada (1910-96) of Lihu‘e led an effort to install a UHF TV transmission relay station atop 3,089-foot Mount Kahili above Knudsen Gap.
To enable workers to access the summit of Mount Kahili with their relay apparatus, Kaua‘i sugar plantations supplied equipment and operators for construction of a 1.3 mile road to the summit.
Not only did Kaua‘i’s TV reception improve with the relay station in operation, but residents throughout Kaua‘i were finally able to watch television.
Because of his determination to establish clearer, island-wide TV on Kaua‘i, Wada was known as Kaua‘i’s “Father of Television.”
In 1928, Jack Wada got his start in the then newly emerging field of electronics, when at the age of 18, he attended electrical school in Chicago.
Following graduation, he worked for the Victor Talking Machine Co. of Chicago.
Back home on Kaua‘i, he was the proprietor of Jack Wada Electronics, which sold and repaired electronic devices.
Crystal clear cable TV reception did not arrive on Kaua‘i until the 1980s.
