ABOVE: Mahalo and Aloha, 1976: Built in 1931 and fronting Kuhio Highway, the Lihue Theater was Kauai's premier movie house until 1976, when it screened its last double feature, Acapulco Gold and The Vampire Lovers, then lettered the marquee with "Mahalo and Aloha."
Now seventy-four thousand people live on Kauai, and the population swells to over one hundred thousand at the height of the tourist season. However, these statistics only begin to tell the story of Kauai's economic and cultural changes over the past fifty years. Up until the 1970s, Kauai's plantations were company towns—remote, self-contained, culturally diverse communities that provided for most of the needs of the plantation and its employees. The plantation doctor delivered keiki in the plantation infirmary. Each family lived in a plantation home with fruit trees, a garden and a garage. There was a primary school, a gym, playgrounds, ballfields, organized sports and a movie theater. The general store stocked essentials and everyone had a tab. Each ethnic community built its own churches or temples, with language classes, social halls, music and dancing. Mountains, streams, waterfalls and beaches provided plenty of hunting, fishing, swimming and surfing.
In the '60s, Hawaii's sugar industry, once the most profitable in the world, initiated a fast but short-lived bonanza, selling agricultural technology and knowledge to third-world countries, where cheap land, labor and operating costs would soon put Hawaii's plantations out of business. In 1971, Kilauea Sugar Company milled its last crop of cane. Kauai began losing population as mechanization, layoffs and unemployment forced people to leave in search of jobs while the major landowners pivoted from selling harvests from the land to selling the land.
I came to Hawaii after graduating from college to write and photograph an article for the Sierra Club Bulletin titled "Paradise Lost." My piece focused on pollution, invasive species and the loss of native flora and fauna. But I hadn't convinced myself that it was all devastation. After reporting from all the major islands, Kauai felt like paradise found to a young man from the Midwest. It was like another country, and I vowed to become a citizen.
I rented a three-bedroom house on Anini Beach for $125 a month and found some roommates. I spearfished, foraged and gardened while taking any part-time work I could find: farm laborer, scuba diver for a fishing company, substitute teacher and the odd writing and photography assignments. I soon discovered that Kauai's interior was not the wilderness it appeared to be from the highway but an overgrown garden of abandoned plantation villages filled with fruit trees and volunteer vegetable patches—food for the picking. Hiking deep into the valleys, I time-traveled through an archaeological wonderland of agricultural terraces, temple ruins and house sites from pre-contact times, with bananas, mountain apples, breadfruit and wild taro growing around springs and along watercourses.
Back out on the highway—an empty road with no stoplights, no rush hour and no traffic—folks drove slowly and waved at cars even before they could see who was driving. They knew every owner by their vehicle's make, model and color.
Kauai's rural villages and isolated plantation communities practiced a style of localism. With wide-eyed ignorance, I stumbled into this invisible web of rules, customs and traditions and was quickly schooled by my neighbors. Some communities still followed the old konohiki system, a traditional, pre-contact approach to sustainably managing a community's resources. Only the konohiki (resource manager) could catch protected fish species, and only during tightly regulated seasons, providing the community with a steady supply of seafood, free for all who helped pull in the nets.
My friends taught me about "Kauai-style" bartering—don't show up at someone's house empty-handed. Fruit, vegetables, dried fish, smoked mountain pig—something you picked or caught. Strictly transactional, they warned, "Nevah give to no stingy buggahs," and then they named those "stingy buggahs" for me.
I still live on Kauai, and yet, fifty years later, I continue to feel like a grateful guest. I occasionally run into some of the folks in these photos of Kauai in the 1970s—a brief breathing space as the plantation economy wound down before the real estate bonanza began. "Things not like before," we reminisce of the good old days, the days captured in these photographs of a beautiful, brief moment in an island's long story.
Uncle Tony and His Chicken, Kilauea Plantation Camp, 1976: Tony Torio, a devoted chicken fighter, operated heavy equipment for the Kilauea Sugar Company until it closed in 1971. Tony went on to drive tractors for Kilauea Agronomics' guava plantation and continued fighting chickens.
Ching Young Store and Hanalei Post Office, 1976: In 1906, Ching Young, an immigrant from Zhongshan, China, built this store. By the early 1970s, Kauai's north shore became a haven for surf nomads and hippie refugees—the unwitting shock troops of the island's coming economic and cultural invasion. Ching Young started stocking granola.
Hanalei Fire Station, 1976: A Kauai fireman's job in the '70s was a plum, with few fires or emergency calls. The pay was middle-class, the benefits generous, the union strong and the opportunities to finagle overtime widespread. The greatest dangers were weight gain, high blood pressure and diabetes from sitting around.
Kapaa Liquor and Wine Company, 1975: Kashiko and Yukiko Kuboyama (better known as Kash and Mrs. Kash) opened the Kapaa Liquor and Wine Company in 1940. They also cooked and sold peanuts boiled in salty water—encouraging customers to drink more beer. When the hippies came in the '70s, they began stocking green-bottle beer.
“Johnny Cowboy,” Kapaa 1975: John Dilling Worthington stumbled out of Betty’s Bar one late afternoon as I wandered Kapa‘a with my view camera. “OK to take your picture?” I asked. He said nothing, lit a cigarette, and stood still as a statue as I set up my tripod, pulled the dark cloth over my head and made this exposure.
Kilauea Sugar Company Garage, 1975: Soon after the Kilauea Sugar Company closed in 1971, a young and very talented mechanic from the mainland named Don leased the company's garage. He moved his tools and equipment into the shop but left everything else the same—a postcard of plantation days.
Lihue Plantation Mill, 1975: The Lihue Mill was the largest on Kauai, capable of processing over eighty thousand tons of sugar annually. During harvest season the mill operated night and day, five days a week, until the plantation closed in 2000. The power plant was then sold, disassembled and shipped to the Philippines.
Kilauea School, 1976: Founded in 1882 by the Kingdom of Hawaii as an "English medium" school, where Hawaiian children would be educated in English, Kilauea School later became a primary school, still in operation today. It's now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Arlene Fujikawa, Puhi Store, 1975: Arlene and her husband, Bob, owned Puhi Store; Arlene was also postmaster at the adjacent post office. Typical of plantation stores of the era, Puhi sold shave ice, pastries, rubber boots, cane knives, fishing supplies and hardware in addition to groceries.
