Dear readers of The Upgrade -

I’m going to use this platform to occasionally share some of my father’s newsletters, The Saturday Briefing, from the archives of 40 years of his weekly articles. Through these pieces, I hope to share the legacy that my family built through 4 generations of family hotel ownership, until our sale in 2016. My father has since passed away, so I want to give his writing new life by sharing it to other fellow hospitality enthusiasts.

-Anne Marie (Kelley) Brown

My father, Richard Kelley'

My Parents Build Their First Hotel: The Islander

by Richard Kelley

‘By the time I was 15, I was the desk clerk and bellman on weekends …’

When I was 13 years old, my parents were completing the Islander Hotel on Seaside Avenue where the Waikiki Trade Center now stands. I got some lessons on how a building was constructed by following my father around the job.

Today is so different from the time my parents entered the hotel business shortly after World War II. There was no real visitor industry then. In 1947, the year they opened the Islander, Hawaiʻi welcomed some 25,000 tourists, the first year the visitor flow rebounded to roughly the same level as in the immediate prewar years. Perhaps my parents were hearing a voice that said over and over again, “Roy, Estelle … if you build it, they will come!”

Well, build it they did. My father not only employed his architectural skills to design the building, but also served as chief financial officer, general contractor and construction site foreman. My mother cooked lunch for the workmen, and when the property was opened, she took reservations and answered letters on a manual typewriter. In later years, when her desk was at the Edgewater, she responded to over 100 letters a day before going home and preparing dinner.

The construction foreman for the Islander was a huge man named Paul Heady who had been out in the Pacific during the war. I was allowed to pitch in and help with the construction where I could do so safely. Child labor laws were not an impediment in those days. Everything went very slowly because construction materials and supplies were hard to obtain in the early postwar period. It was a great experience.

The Islander was a five-story walk-up with 48 units and a little two-by-four office on the ground floor. Listed room rates started at $5.00 a night, single occupancy, and $6.00 for a double. But if you were a little short of cash and a room was available, my father would make you a deal!

The property was fully occupied for many years and provided a base of operations for many additional rental units scattered around the neighborhood in cottages, low-rise apartment buildings and converted homes.

My experience in the hotel industry started in Housekeeping when I was in junior high school. It was in a small but busy room facing the parking lot behind the Islander. We served not only the Islander “tower,” but the far-flung group of outlying units, scattered in a two-block radius, from Aloha Drive to Nohonani Street. You learned how to be efficient because you practically needed roller skates if you forgot something when you went out to make up rooms.

Yoshiko Sato ran Housekeeping efficiently. The laundry was done in small domestic washers across the driveway in an open garage. My summer job was to run towels, linen and supplies to the housekeepers as they cleaned rooms in this far-flung hotel and to help with heavy work, like moving beds and furniture.

By the time I was 15, I was the desk clerk and bellman on weekends. I can remember the thrill of getting a tip when I hauled bags up the stairs of the main building or over to one of the outlying units. I particularly remember those stairs. They were deceptive, zigging and zagging so you could never see more than half a flight at a time. The stairs became a challenge for me in the summertime, when I worked in Housekeeping and carried linen and bags up those flights.

On Fridays, I escaped the stairs by staying up all night to do the audit. The accounting for the whole hotel, more than 200 rooms altogether, was on a giant manual spreadsheet covering three or four pages. Every night, someone had to add in the day’s room revenue and miscellaneous charges across the columns and make the columns and the rows balance, using a manually cranked, 10-key adding machine. I never could get it right the first time and often had to stay far into the morning, punchy from lack of sleep, to make it all add up correctly.

When elevators, air conditioning and hotel swimming pools came along, the Islander became obsolete and was torn down to make way for one of the expansion units of the Waikiki Theater.

Roy and Estelle Kelley at the Islander Hotel, 1947. Islander Hotel.

From Paddling the Outrigger by Dr. Richard Kelley, pp. 26–27. Originally published in the Saturday Briefing newsletter, 1984–1997.