Tale #28

I was Governor Bill Quinn's Press Secretary when he went to Washington during the Cuban Missile Crisis in the autumn of 1962. He returned and told me grimly that he had an important message for the people of Hawaii. He wanted me to help him write a brief speech and select an appropriate forum at which to present it. "And," the Governor said, 'I don't mean some damned tree-planting ceremony. I want people to hear this one and pay attention.!"

So I talked to Ray Milici, the advertising man, a good friend of mine and the Governor's. We considered various alternatives and then suddenly remembered the State's almost forgotten emergency broadcast system. It was a communications center which had been set up a few years earlier at the behest of Akuhead and Wayne Collins in a tunnel at Diamond Head; it was for tidal wave warnings and other emergencies. Well, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought us close to war with the Soviet Union; you couldn't have much more of an emergency than that. We alerted all of Hawaii's radio and TV stations.

At exactly the same moment that evening, every broadcast station in the Islands carried the Governor's message. Better than a tree planting, he admitted. I don't know if he ever knew that I'd even alerted the Muzak people, so his voice had been piped into most of the elevators in Honolulu.

Roger Coryell,
Oregon