Island History for Friday, November 19, 2010

On Jan. 2, 1931, the newly elected Kaua‘i Board of Supervisors — David Luke, Eric A. Knudsen, Noboru Miyake, William Ellis and Joseph H. Moragne — held their initial meeting in the County Building.

Notable among them was Miyake, whose election to the board had made him the first person of Japanese ancestry to hold public office in Hawai‘i. He would later become a multiple-term state senator.

And Chairman Knudsen during World War II would become known as the “Teller of Hawaiian Tales,” while he narrated his stories of journeys into the mountains of Kaua‘i, legendary times when Hawaiians and their gods mingled freely, and Hawaiian cowboys and ghosts, over the airwaves of KTOH radio, Lihu‘e.

So popular was Knudsen’s program that its sponsor, the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Honolulu, offered to mail reprints of each story he told over the radio.

Over the course of one year, 50,000 reprints were mailed.

In the course of a long political career from which he retired in 1932, Knudsen also served in the territorial House of Representatives and Senate.

Ellis’ political career on the board spanned three decades (1930-1951), during which time he was designated or elected chairman 17 times — an era of Kaua‘i government marked by an unsurpassed degree of decorum and harmony.

The board’s first order of business were appointments of five district overseers, two park superintendents and five water collectors, whose duty it was to receive payments of water users.

Next, action was deferred on an ordinance drafted by County Attorney A.G. Kaulukou that would have created a county public works department.

Headed by the county engineer, this department would have been charged with road work, maintenance, waterworks and public parks.

Raises were granted in the treasurer’s and auditor’s office, but Kaulukou’s request for a $25 monthly raise for his clerk was denied.