Word: dillinghams
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Walter Francis Dillingham was proud of being a karnaaina (oldtimer) and he loved Hawaii's traditions. He seldom appeared without an orchid in his lapel, and he was pleased that the women of his family learned to do the hula. Yet, for all his fondness for the old ways, Dillingham probably did more to mold a modern Hawaii than any other man. And when he died last week at 88, the islands mourned the loss of "Uncle Walter," who in a sense had been patriarch to a whole state...
...Dillingham's enterprises grew to be worth at least $150 million, and the family's influence in Hawaii was unsurpassed. During World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt wanted to know about the situation in Hawaii, he phoned Walter Dillingham. When President Eisenhower visited the islands, he stepped off his plane, looked about and immediately asked, "Where's Walter...
...first Dillingham in the islands was Walter's father-Benjamin Franklin Dillingham, first officer on a clipper ship out of San Francisco. In Honolulu on shore leave in 1865, he fell off a horse, broke his leg, and settled down for life. Benjamin bought a hardware store, married a missionary's daughter, had four children. In 1888 the ambitious ex-sailor got a royal franchise from King Kalakaua to build a narrow-gauge railroad to haul sugar cane from inland Oahu down to the sea. Skeptics called it "Dillingham's Folly." But it was a huge success...
...company dredged the opening channel through the reefs of Pearl Harbor in 1902, eventually deepened it enough to change Pearl from a little coaling station to one of the world's great harbors. Walter Dillingham used the muck dragged up from the sea to fill in low, marshy areas around Honolulu, over the years created 5,000 acres of solid ground that now holds a full third of the city's population, is valued at upwards of $280 million. Most valuable of all is a section that before 1925 was nothing but a narrow sand crescent, covered with...
Harvard-educated Lowell Dillingham tempers acumen with whimsy. He insists on the color blue for almost everything, including his office telephones, carpets and draperies. He shuns Honolulu society, spends his free time at a 105,000-acre ranch where he raises and hunts game birds. One of his recent tasks has been to prop up the Dillingham image. Earnings have slumped because of a drop in construction contracts; Brother Ben Dillingham, 46, was defeated last fall in a race for the U.S. Senate; and Henry Kaiser, particularly, has been giving the Dillinghams some stiff new island competition. To such challenges...