I still think of KGMB as Consolidated Amusement, the Star-Bulletin (Joe and Ma Farrington) and the Mormons, all of whom owned the joint when I first went to work there just after WWII. Did you know what the GMB stood for? They were the initials of the first owner manager when the radio station was located in the basement of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

J. Howard Worrell (spell?) was the manager and part owner (through his wife's holdings in Consolidated; she was a Cooke) when I went to work there in '47. After he became manager, he wanted to get out of the Royal because he didn't like to pay rent. The cheapest real estate he could find in town was along Kapiolani Blvd, which was nothing but swamp between Kau Kau Corner and the Eastman Kodak building. He wanted only a couple or three acres for the building and tower, but the bank made him buy 50 acres of the swamp as a minimum. Really pissed him off. The first part of the building went up just before WWII. It had the two announce booths, a bare studio about 15 x 20 and an auditorium studio (it was gutted to become our first TV studio) with theater seating and a raised stage on the mauka end. Bob Hope's big radio show in those days was on CBS and sponsored by Pepsodent, but nobody in Hawaii gave a shit about him so KGMB did not carry it. Instead, we had "The Pepsodent Luau" which had a live band (Al Kealoha Perry and his Singing Surfriders, who also did "Hawaii Calls" with Web Edwards from the Moana Hotel) and a live audience of a couple of hundred in the theater seating. The director of the show was Bill Pope of Holst & Cummings, who later became the honcho of that ad agency when Milt Holst stepped down.

Old J. Howard stopped grumbling about all the land the bank had made him buy when all sorts of new buildings popped up along the street in the late '40s and the 50's and his acreage was worth a bundle. (He used to bring in his wife's old aluminum pots and pans when they got holes in them, and had Ernie Lindemann weld them tight again.)

Wayne Collins
a2Darth@rcn.com