Light/Breezes

Light/Breezes
SUNRISE AT DEATH VALLEY-Photo by Tom Cochrun

Sunday, January 25, 2015

ICONIC COINCIDENCE

A WORLD CAPITOL
GROUND ZERO
HALEIWA
    1,860 miles from the nearest continent, further away from "mainland" than anywhere in the world is a funky surf town that is a premier sports capitol of the planet. 
   As fate would have it, just a few miles down the road is ground zero for an Industry that is now world wide. In 1899 recent Harvard grad James Drummond Dole came to Oahu and began what became Dole Foods, the folks who turned Pineapple into a major crop and built an empire in the process.

Dole
Courtesy of Dole Foods
Kahanamoku
Courtesy of www.nnbd.com
   The creation of modern surfing is attributed to Duke Kahanmoku, born on Oahu nine years before Dole arrived.
In many ways their lives paralleled. Kahanmoku was a champion swimmer, actor and a businessman. 
    Surfing and Pineapple-icons of the Islands. It is a cosmic coincidence these vastly divergent influences share roots on Oahu and both attract visitors from around the globe.















    At a Disneyesque location just a few miles down highway 99, people cue up to ride on the Aloha Express to view the red oxide volcanic earth that helped Jim Dole take the Pineapple from Paraguay and make it as Hawaiian as the North Shore has made Surfing.





     Dole is now about a lot more than Pineapple.


   Surfing is also an industry. Dole and Kahanmoku are revered. Their iconic legacies remain neighbors in North Oahu where Kings and Queens were once the royalty and where chickens strut on the court house lawn.
   Aloha!

   See you down the trail.

6 comments:

  1. Lots of help wanted signs. Maybe you could get a job and stay in Hawaii!!! :^>

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  2. You now, there could be worse assignments.

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  3. I had a high school friend who spent a summer picking pineapples for Dole in Hawaii. He said he never hoped to work that hard in his life again and his hands were stained red for months.

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  4. Left out of all comments during the tour of the original plantation were facts about wages, conditions, benefits and overall status of the work force. Perhaps there is a clue in the origins of the plantation. It was land that had belonged to the royal family, until an uprising forced them from the ancestral land. Soon after that young Mr Dole was able to buy the property with the help of his cousin, Sanford Dole who just happened to be the Governor of the Island. Governor Dole just happened to become governor after the 1893 coup that forced Queen Lili'uokalani from the land. The land then became a government holding, which no doubt just by quirk of circumstances became available as the young Mr Dole arrived.

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  5. Great pics and commentary Tom. Yes, the Hawaiian people as I am just learning were very much taken advantage of during the Land Grab. Economics in Hawaii are polarized, to say the least.
    LR

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