Mauna Kea Oral History Appendix - Office of Mauna Kea Management

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Now, when I went to him, he said “Give me the addresses of all these people that are
bothering you…” [chuckles]
And what were they bothering you about
I was the only one they could find when they would come here to visit, to take them up.
I see, so they were always trying to get you to take them up to the summit of Mauna
Kea
Yes, a lot of them. And I could hardly do it, and I had to get help from other people to
help with these visitors [chuckling]. It was ridiculous. So Mr. Akiyama wrote to a whole
bunch of people, and the only person he heard from was Dr. Kuiper. Now Dr. Kuiper was
very excited and Mr. Akiyama got very excited, and he had terrific political pull. And once,
Dr. Kuiper had written to me and said he was going to be busy for several years… I
wrote down when he said he was coming back, and sure enough, he did, and he couldn’t
understand how I knew he was coming in. But I arranged for Mr. Akiyama to go there and
meet him.
I must stress here, that from that time on, I saw Dr. Kuiper quite a bit, but I never had
anything to do with it, and I don’t want that to get out that I had a lot to do with anything,
because I didn’t.
Okay.
I only got involved if Dr. Kuiper contacted me and told me that he was coming. But Mr.
Akiyama did everything. He didn’t want to cut me out, and he was kind to me, but he was
powerful, and Governor Burns just gave him whatever he wanted for the road and that.
Sure. So they were able to improve the road. Because when you went up earlier it wasn’t
very good.
Yes, but it was no problem.
So they improved the road
In the matter of a few days I think, Kuwaye Brothers did it.
Hmm.
Mr. Akiyama has documentation on that. He’s been criticized by some people for not
getting those papers preserved, and I don’t know where it stands now. I haven’t seen
them since Dr. Kuiper’s daughter visited them about maybe three years ago. They had
me out to meet her… But I was only involved when Mr. Akiyama called me. I took
Governor Burns, Dr. Kuiper, the Adjutant General Stevenson, and a friend who worked
with me, John Chin, in the jeep, and that’s a story that I write about in here [pointing to
the paper].
Good.
I don’t want to get funny here, but when we went up there, and coming down, was Dr.
Howard Powers; he’s passed away, and was a great friend of mine. They were coming
down, and he told me, “Don’t you let anyone poke any holes in that lake.” The Governor
is sitting there. I asked him if he’d had breakfast, I didn’t know what to say to him. But he
said he “hardly ever ate breakfast.” We got up to the top, and he said he had to take a
leak, “Boy, watch out.” [chuckles] He went over there, I guess it was in the direction of
Lake Goodrich [chuckles], and when he came back from looking, Dr. Kuiper had hit his
bald head on the jeep because there wasn’t too much room there. And John Chin was
administering a band aid… And Dr. Kuiper was telling me a story that altitude kind of
makes you like this. He told me that when he was a young astronomer working in
Indonesia, they said that they had to get out, the war was coming… I don’t know if it was
World War I or World War II [chuckles]. He said there was a famous astronomer, world
Mauna Kea– “Ka Piko Kaulana o ka ‘Äina”
Kumu Pono Associates LLC
A Collection of Oral History Interviews (HiMK67-050606) A:595