Long before Ron Wiley spoke into his first microphone, there was Mike Ashman, one of Kauai’s first radio disc jockeys. I’ve recently had the pleasure of getting to know Mike through email exchanges and his book, “Kauai: As it was
Long before Ron Wiley spoke into his first microphone, there was Mike Ashman, one of Kauai’s first radio disc jockeys. I’ve recently had the pleasure of getting to know Mike through email exchanges and his book, “Kauai: As it was in the 1940s and 1950s,” in which he paints wonderful pictures of life on the Garden Island.
When Mike was hired to help launch KTOH, Kauai’s first commercial radio station that went on the air May 10, 1940, he was an 18-year-old with two years experience as the only all-night DJ on San Francisco’s KSAN.
Now 92 years old, with his radio voice still intact, he has plenty stories of the fun he had bringing news and entertainment to the people of Kauai.
“Originally, many folks on Kauai said, ‘Who’s going to listen? Nobody has a radio,’” he says. But six days a week of news and entertainment, plus Sundays filled with local musical groups performing live in the radio station’s studio, got Kauai people hooked.
“People at home just sat back and marveled at what was coming out of the box called a radio,” Mike says. “Within a year, radios were selling so fast that Jack Wada’s electronics store couldn’t keep up with the demand.”
KTOH Party Line
To bolster early afternoon listenership, Mike hosted a talk show – a brand new concept at the time – named “The KTOH Party Line.”
“With Kauai’s thin telephone book in one hand and an opened paperclip in the other, I would turn to any old page and randomly chose a name, telephone that person and start a conversation,” he says. “Then I’d ask the question of the week, something like, ‘What should we do about the millions of pesky bufos (giant toads) hopping around in everybody’s yard?’
“It would have been wonderful if we’d had some way to save those candid dialogues,” he says. “They’d be perfect examples today of the various patterns of Pidgin English, Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino and Japanese. But, tape recorders hadn’t been invented yet.”
Comfort Stations
As a young man, Mike’s friends and acquaintances on Kauai helped him learn things about the adult world. One time, an acquaintance named Eddie asked him if he would like to visit “the girls.”
“I thought he meant some librarians or schoolteachers, so I said, ‘Sure. Let’s go,’” Mike recalls. Instead, Eddie drove them to a set of dark green cottages alongside Kamalu Road in the Wailua Homesteads.
“It didn’t take long for me to conclude that these friendly courtesans were not interested in books,” Mike says. “I was solicited that night but politely declined for several reasons. I was deathly afraid of getting some kind of horrible disease that I couldn’t explain to my family back home. And then there was my self-conscious worry of an inexperienced 18-year-old: What beginner really wants to perform a duet with a professional?”
While Eddie was being “comforted,” Mike chatted with unoccupied girls and the housemother/timekeeper about ordinary things like home and family. “Without thinking I asked whether they were part of a ‘white slave ring’ that I’d read about in the Sunday paper,” he says. “They both laughed out loud and the housemother patted me on the top of my head.”
They explained that most of the girls were there to make a lot of money then return to wherever their homes were with a nest egg, get married and raise a family. Years later, when Mike returned to Kauai after spending time overseas, he looked for those dark green cottages out of curiosity, but they were long gone.
Filipino Mystery Singer
A trained pianist, Mike spent some of his off-air time performing with his Mike Ashman Quintet, often at Club Jetty, a restaurant-nightclub located on the jetty at Nawiliwili Harbor (The restaurant closed after the building was destroyed by Hurricane Iniki in 1992.)
One time the manager of a local store had a sign painted for the display stand near the front door that read: “Enjoy dancing Friday and Saturday evenings to the music of the Mike Ashman Quintet. They don’t play slow. They don’t play fast. They play sort of half-fasst.” (Say it out loud).
Mike earned the nicknames of “The Albino Hawaiian” and “The Japanese Troubadour” for his talent performing popular Hawaiian songs and Japanese ballads.
But it was “Filipino Mystery Singer” that was his longest-lasting nickname, originating from the time he recorded about a dozen Visayan, Tagalog and Ilocano love songs for KTOH’s Filipino Radio Hour as part of a contest in which listeners were challenged to identify the “Filipino Mystery Singer.” The grand prize was a used car, a very big deal in those days when plantation workers, who typically made only about $28 per month, could not easily afford their own vehicles.
The station received thousands of votes over six months, but nobody knew that Mike was the “Filipino Mystery Singer,” until his identity was revealed after the contest had ended.
Mike lived on Kauai three times: for two years beginning in 1940 when he helped launch KTOH; for four years after World War II; and for eight years starting in 1995. In between, he and his wife spent four years starting a Dole pineapple plantation in the Philippines, nine years working for the Government of Micronesia as director of public information and director of tourism, “and enough other positions that have taken me to 87 countries and my wife to 41 countries,” he says.
“I enjoyed Kauai 100 percent. If I could, I would do it all over again.”
(Today’s KONG 570 AM is the direct descendant of the original KTOH radio station.)
• Pamela Varma Brown is the publisher “Kauai Stories,” and the forthcoming “Kauai Stories 2.”
