Prominent People | Page 156 | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

June 9, 2016 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Dillingham Transportation Building

In 1889, after devoting twenty years to the hardware business, Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Dillingham created the O‘ahu Railroad and Land Company (OR&L.) This company was primarily responsible for the development of the 160-mile O‘ahu Railroad.

Through these rail interests, the corporation became involved with the development of the various sugarcane plantations along its route, and later expanded its cane activities to the islands of Kauai, Maui and Hawai‘i with the McBryde, Kihei, Puna and Ola‘a Sugar Companies. (NPS)

Ultimately OR&L sublet land, partnered on several sugar operations and/or hauled cane from Ewa Plantation Company, Honolulu Sugar Company in ‘Aiea, O‘ahu Sugar in Waipahu, Waianae Sugar Company, Waialua Agriculture Company and Kahuku Plantation Company, as well as pineapples for Dole.

By the early-1900s, the expanded railway cut across the island, serving several sugar and pineapple plantations, and the popular Haleʻiwa Hotel. They even included a “Kodak Camera Train” (associated with the Hula Show) for Sunday trips to Hale‘iwa for picture-taking.

When the hotel opened on August 5, 1899, guests were conveyed from the railway terminal over the Anahulu stream to fourteen luxurious suites, each had a bath with hot-and-cold running water. Dillingham died April 7, 1918 (aged 73.)

Built in 1929, in memory of Dillingham by his son Walter Francis Dillingham, the 4-story Dillingham Transportation Building carries the ‘transportation building’ because at that time the Dillingham family was concerned with various types of transportation to and around Hawaii.

Walter founded the Hawaiian Dredging Company (later Dillingham Construction) and ran the O‘ahu Railway and Land Company founded by his father.

The building was designed in an Italian Renaissance Revival by architect Lincoln Rogers of Los Angeles, who also designed the Hawaii State Art Museum (1928.)

“Lincoln Rogers, architect of the building, in choosing a style of architecture generally called ‘Mediterranean’ with Italian Renaissance as the guiding principle, found a motif ideally suited to a semi-tropic city surrounded by sparkling seas and green-clad mountains.” (Honolulu)

The Dillingham Transportation Building is Italian Renaissance concrete and concrete block structure with three connected wings, and is a good example of the Mediterranean revival style applied to a commercial structure.

The first story round arched arcade, upper story quoins and the low pitched, tile, hipped roof, well convey the style. The Mediterranean and Spanish mission revival styles enjoyed tremendous popularity in Hawaii during the twenties.

These styles, the closest European equivalents to tropical design, were considered to be the most appropriate forms for Hawaii’s climate with their arcades providing a sense of airy openness.

The Dillingham Transportation Building is one of a number of downtown buildings to employ these styles, and is the most imposing of the Mediterranean revival buildings in the area. (NPS)

The structure has a Spanish tile hip roof, and below the eave there is a frescoed decoration. The entrance lobby features Art Deco patterns of variously colored marbles and bricks. (Historic Hawai‘i)

You will note nautical references above the door arches and along the outside walls of the building – noting ships, sailors and twisted rope patterns (even over the elevators.)

The Dillingham Transportation Building shares arcade space with the nearby Pacific Guardian Building, whose street address is ‘through’ the Dillingham lobby. (Star-Bulletin)

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June 3, 2016 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

The Artist and the Architect

The artist, known as ‘Palani’ among his Hawaiian friends, was named a ‘Living Treasure’ for his paintings and murals showing Hawai‘i’s culture; the architect was identified as “the man who changed the face of the Pacific”. They got together in 1956.

Let’s look back …

The artist, Louis Henri Jean Charlot, descended from “sundry exotic ancestors,” was born in Paris. His father, Henri, was a French businessman; Anna, his mother, an artist and a devout Catholic, was the daughter of Louis Goupil, a native of Mexico City.

Also living in Paris was Jean Charlot’s great-uncle, Eugène Goupil, a collector of Mexican works of art. Jean, who began to draw around age two, grew up surrounded by pre-Hispanic antiquities. (Thompson)

In his teens, Charlot had become one of a Catholic group that called itself Gilde Notre-Dame (“Parisian adolescents (who) used to gather in a crypt”) made up of sculptors, stained glass makers, embroiderers and decorators.

“My life in France was on the whole rational, national, obeying this often heard dictum that a Frenchman is a man who ignores geography. There were though, simultaneously, un-French elements at work. Russian, sephardim, Aztec ancestors, warmed my blood to adventure.” (Charlot; Thompson)

After a Mexican trip, in 1928, Charlot and his mother moved to New York where he rented a small apartment on the top floor of 42 Union Square from the artist Morris Kantor. The apartment was unheated, which probably contributed to the death of his mother from pneumonia in January, 1929.

On a brief trip to Mexico in 1931, Charlot met his future wife, Dorothy Zohmah Day. During a visit to Zohmah in Los Angeles in 1933, Charlot met the printer Lynton R Kistler and produced Picture Book, “a repertory of motifs I had used up to then.” Returning to New York, teaching and lecturing occupied much of Charlot’s time.

In May 1939, Jean Charlot and Zohmah Day were married in San Francisco. “It was a long courtship,” commented Charlot. “Eight years. We were always in different places”.

The years from 1941-44 were spent as artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia, Athens, and instructor in art history at the University of California, Berkeley and artist-in-residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Thompson)

Then he had a chance to come to Hawaiʻi – and he stayed. An invitation to create a fresco at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, brought Charlot to Honolulu in 1949 where he painted Relation of Man and Nature in Old Hawai’i at Bachman Hall.

He accepted a position as professor of art at the University, and Hawai’i became the Charlot family’s permanent home. Attracted to the culture of the native Hawaiian, just as he had been interested in the folk aspects of the residents of rural France and the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he studied Hawaiian history, customs and religion, and learned the Hawaiian language.

From 1949 to 1979 Charlot created almost six hundred easel paintings, several hundred prints, and thirty-six works of art in public places in fresco, ceramic tile and sculpture. He taught summer sessions at several schools. (Thompson)

The architect, George James ‘Pete’ Wimberly, was born on January 16, 1915 in Ellensburg, Washington. He earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1937 from the University of Washington.

He served as a draftsman/designer in Seattle, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and in 1940 was in a civil service position as “journeyman architect doing naval work at Pearl Harbor.”

“At the end of World War II, there was a great backlog demand for buildings of all sorts. During the four years of war, only essential or defense-oriented projects were allowed.”

“Most of the architects at the time were not hurting because they were all doing defense work, either as private practitioners or as direct employees of the Armed Forces. (W)hen V-J Day was announced, I left the Navy Yard and never went back, except to pick up my pay check.” (Wimberly; WATG)

“I had an agreement with Howard (Loren) Cook (who was working on Tripler Hospital) that I would set up an office and we would split the take, his salary and my fees 50/50.”

“Fortunately, there was a great deal of work out there. Furthermore, I had the fortune to know Gardner Dailey on the mainland. He selected me as the local architect for the remodelling of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. (1946) … With this prestigious commission, we suddenly had credentials and were able to pick up other worthy jobs.” (Wimberly; WATG)

The artist and the architect got together in the design and construction of Charlot’s ‘dream house.’

It was part of the expansion of KahaIa in the 1950s. Before the expansion, Kahala was used mostly for beach homes along the shore, with another row of houses on the mauka side of Kahala Avenue. Bishop Estate opened up the balance of the area for residential and related development.

In recognition of his work in Hawaiian culture, Bishop Estate gave Charlot one of the first choices of the new lots. He picked the end lot of the three on the little appendix to Kahala Avenue, fronting the Wai‘alae Golf Course, the house sits on a flat lot bordered by the golf course on the north and a canal on the west.

The house was completed in 1958 as a true collaboration between Charlot and Wimberly. Charlot’s art and therefore his dream house had to fit its site. Wimberly also emphasized a ‘sense of place’ in his architecture and went on to build many structures that exuded this appropriateness to the lifestyle and climate of Hawai‘i.

Fitting into Hawai‘i’s lifestyle and climate is demonstrated in its open plan (the master bedroom overlooking the living room, only bedrooms and bathrooms are fully walled in,) blurred definition between the interior and exterior (the built-in dining table that connects to the exterior …

… the two story height glazed sections that connect to the lanai area, and the lanai with the same flooring material as the drawing room), incorporation of native arts (mural, petroglyph tiles), use of native materials (hapu’u) and siting by tradewinds. The house is an intensely personal one, yet a characteristic of Charlot’s art is its emphasis on appropriateness. (NPS)

It had a uniquely artistic flair, incorporating the openness and lanais of island homes with the vertical emphasis of traditional French rural ‘architecture and the brick floors and back courtyards of Mexican houses. (NPS)

Here, Charlot conducted most of his work in this house and more particularly in his 2nd floor studio. This was the final period of Charlot’s life, when he reached the peak of his artistic powers and was able to synthesize the esthetics of Europe, Mexico and Pacific Islands, the places he lived and influenced his art. His career spanned these places. Charlot remained active as an artist and a scholar until his death on March 20, 1979.

Wimberly also went on the great things. He invented a style of resort architecture that was creative, exotic and imaginative. His landmark projects helped define Hawai‘i tourism and created a Hawai‘i-based business designing resorts around the world.

Wimberly “established himself as perhaps the most successful resort architect in the world” and that his “Honolulu-based firm of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (also known as WATG) designed many of the Pacific Rim’s pace-setting hotels and is the world’s largest ‘niche’ architecture firm, specializing in the $4-trillion-dollar travel industry.” (Honolulu Weekly) Wimberly died December 30, 1995.

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May 31, 2016 by Peter T Young 3 Comments

Sloggetts

Henry Charles Sloggett was a medical doctor. He first visited the Islands in 1875 while travelling on the Challenger Expedition (a British circumnavigation of the world, studying the deep sea and distribution of life at different depths.)

Following that (1883,) the family (wife, Annie Ellery (1850-1900;) son Henry Digby (1876-1938) and daughter Myra (1878-1944)) moved from England to the US and Canada.

Yearning to return and live in the Islands, the Sloggetts came to the Islands in about 1895. For a while, Digby remained on the continent, working in the salmon industry at Puget Sound, Washington.

In 1898, daughter Myra married Johann (John) Friedrich Humburg, a German merchant working for the Hackfeld Company (forerunner to AmFac.) He was later VP of operations in San Francisco.

Upon arriving in the Islands, Dr Sloggett opened an office on Beretania Street, specializing in eye and ear disorders. “A few years after beginning practice here, Dr. Sloggett was appointed by President Dole of the Republic a member of the Board of Health.”

“Then, when Dr Cooper resigned the presidency of that body on departing for the States to visit his old home and attend the grand council of the Elks, Dr Sloggett was appointed to succeed him (as President of the Board of Health.)” (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, March 25, 1905)

Annie Sloggett died in 1900, “She had been in ill-health for some time but no fears that she would not recover had been felt by her family. Heart disease was the cause of Mrs Sloggett’s death. She was fifty one years of age.” (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, May 30, 1900)

“After the death of his wife … Dr Sloggett resigned from the Board of Health and went to Shanghai In the service of the Oriental Insurance Co.”

“He returned to Honolulu In 1903 and was immediately appointed Superintendent of the Insane Asylum.” (Evening bulletin., March 25, 1905) (Dr Sloggett died in 1905.)

Digby Sloggett came to the Islands in 1896. He first worked at BF Ehlers & Co in Honolulu (forerunner to Liberty House,) then took “the responsible post of assistant bookkeeper of Lihue plantation, on Kauai.”

“Mr Sloggett had been with Ehlers & Co. a year and a half, and the management was loth to see him depart, though he goes to a better position.” (Honolulu Republican, September 28, 1900)

He remained until 1900 when he left to join the staff of the Maui Agricultural Co at Paʻia, Maui. He, later, resigned that post to become assistant manager of GN Wilcox’s Grove Farm plantation in 1920.

Digby married Lucy Etta Wilcox. Etta was daughter of Samuel Whitney and Emma Washburn Lyman Wilcox, and granddaughter of missionaries Abner and Lucy Wilcox. Digby and Lucy had five children.

Over the years, Digby Sloggett was manager of the Samuel Mahelona Memorial Hospital for tubercular patients at Kealia, Kauai; director of the Lihue Soda Co., Ltd.; director and secretary of the Kauai Telephone Co.; director of the Garden Island Publishing Co.; treasurer of the Grove Farm Co., Ltd., and Lihuʻe Hospital, and a member of the advisory boards of Lihue Branch Bank of Hawaii, Ltd., and the Lihue branch of the Salvation Army.

A lasting legacy of Henry Digby and Lucy Etta Wilcox Sloggett is Camp Sloggett in Kokeʻe on Kauai. It started as a family mountain retreat for hiking, horseback riding and relaxation.

After the Digby and Etta’s deaths, the Sloggett children maintained the camp for their own use. They later transferred the Camp to the YWCA.

The YWCA had long associations with the Sloggett family. Elsie and Mabel Wilcox, sisters of Etta, started the YWCA on Kauai. Etta Wilcox Sloggett was also a former president of the Kauai YWCA. (nps)

In addition to Camp Sloggett, other Kokeʻe camp lots surveyed and staked by Charles S Judd in 1918 who was then Superintendent of Forestry.

He modeled these lots and their intended uses after recreation cabins and campsites that were being established on the continental United States in the US National Forests at that time. It grew to a total of 135-lots.

In addition to Sloggett, the Boy Scouts run the Camp Alan Faye and Hui O Laka controls the former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp. Numerous other individuals have family cabins leased from the state.

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May 27, 2016 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

‘Unknown Negro Mess Man’

Following the attack, the reports from all of Pearl Harbor’s ships and shore facilities of the events of December 7, 1941 were assembled and analyzed; then, the process of confirmation and then giving commendations to all personnel cited in the hundreds of reports began.

The Navy Board of Awards was established on February 12, 1942. A Navy spokesman recommended that the ‘unknown Negro mess man’ be considered for an award (the sole commendation to an African American.)

The unknown Negro mess man was named to the 1941 Honor Roll of Race Relations. On March 12, 1942, Dr Lawrence D Reddick announced, after corresponding with the Navy, that he found the name was ‘Doris Miller.’ (Aiken)

Let’s look back …

Doris Miller was born on October 12, 1919, the third of four sons to Connery and Henrietta Miller in Waco, Texas. He was named for the midwife present at his birth.

The family lived in a three room farmhouse near Speegleville, Texas where his father was a farmer. His life had begun in a time of controversy, turmoil and violence, although his immediate surroundings appeared to be peaceful and simple. Everyone in America struggled through the Great Depression. (Baltimore AfroAmerican)

Along with his siblings, Doris worked to support the family farm from an early age. In his youth, he became an excellent marksman as he hunted for small game with his brothers.

Doris also had a successful school career at AJ Moore High School. His tall stature gained the attention of the football coach at the school who recruited Doris as a fullback on the team.

However, as Doris became older, and as war loomed on the horizon, he longed to join the armed forces much to the chagrin of his parents. After several attempts to join different sectors of the military, Doris enlisted in the US Navy in Dallas, Texas, on September 16, 1939.

Unfortunately, at the time of his enlistment, discrimination limited the areas of service for African Americans in the military. After training, his assignment was as a mess attendant, third class. (Danner; Waco History)

“You have to understand that when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president in 1932, he opened up the Navy again to blacks, but in one area only; they were called mess attendants, stewards, and cooks,” says Clark Simmons, who was a mess attendant on the USS Utah during the Pearl Harbor attack.

“The Navy was so structured that if you were black, this was what they had you do in the Navy – you only could be a servant.” (National Geographic)

After training in Norfolk, Virginia, and serving a stint on the ammunition ship Pyro, Miller was assigned to the battleship West Virginia in 1940. He soon won renown as the best heavyweight boxer onboard.

With the exception of a training stay at Secondary Battery Gunnery School, Miller would remain on the West Virginia until December 7, 1941, when the ship was in port at Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i.

The morning of the Japanese attack, Miller was doing laundry rounds when the call to battle stations went out. He rushed to his station, an antiaircraft-battery magazine. Seeing the magazine damaged by torpedo fire, he went above decks to help the wounded to safety.

Word came that “the captain and the executive officer, the ‘XO,’ were on the bridge and they both were injured,” says Simmons. “So Dorie Miller went up and physically picked up the captain and brought him down to the first aid station. And then he went back and manned a .50-caliber machine gun, which he had not been trained on.” (National Geographic)

He committed his efforts to the defense of the West Virginia until superiors ordered all to abandon ship.

“It wasn’t hard,” said Miller shortly after the battle. “I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine. I had watched the others with these guns. I guess I fired her for about 15 minutes. I think I got one of those Jap planes. They were diving pretty close to us.” (National Geographic)

Here’s a clip of Cuba Gooding, Jr portraying Miller in ‘Pearl Harbor.’

Of the 1,541 men on West Virginia during the attack, 130 were killed and 52 wounded. Then, word circulated about the ‘unknown Negro mess man’ and his actions that day.

On March 14, 1942, The Pittsburgh Courier released a story that named the black mess man as ‘Dorie’ Miller. This is the earliest found use of ‘Dorie,’ an apparent typographical error. (Some sources have further misspelled the name to ‘Dore’ and ‘Dorrie.’

Various writers have attributed ‘Dorie’ to other suggestions such as a “nickname to shipmates and friends”… or “the Navy thought he should go by the more masculine-sounding Dorie.” (Aiken)

On May 27, 1942 in a ceremony at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Chester W Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, personally recognized Miller aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise.

Miller became the first African American recipient of the Navy Cross, the highest decoration the navy can offer besides the Congressional Medal of Honor. (Danner; Waco History)

The Navy’s commendation noted, “For distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawai‘i, by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941.”

“While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety, and later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.” (Navy)

The Pittsburgh Courier called for Miller to be allowed to return home for a war bond tour like white heroes. In November 1942, Miller arrived at Maui, and was ordered on a war bond tour while still attached to the heavy cruiser Indianapolis.

In December 1942 and January 1943, he gave talks in Oakland, California, in his hometown of Waco, Texas, in Dallas and to the first graduating class of African-American sailors from Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Chicago.

Miller then reported to duty aboard the aircraft carrier Liscome Bay as Petty Officer, Ship’s Cook Third Class. After training in Hawai‘i for the Gilbert Islands operation, Liscome Bay participated in the Battle of Tarawa which began on November 20, 1943. (Philadelphia Tribune)

During the battle of the Gilbert Islands, on November 24, 1943, a single torpedo from a Japanese submarine struck the escort carrier near the stern. (Texas State Historical Assn)

The aircraft bomb magazine detonated a few moments later, sinking the warship within minutes. There were 272 survivors. The rest of the crew was listed as “presumed dead.”

On December 7, 1943 — exactly two years after Pearl Harbor —Miller’s parents were notified their son “was dead.” (Philadelphia Tribune)

In addition to conferring upon him the Navy Cross, the Navy honored Doris Miller by naming a dining hall, a barracks and a destroyer escort for him. The USS Miller (a Knox-class frigate) is the third naval ship to be named after a black navy man.

In Waco, a YMCA branch, a park and a cemetery bear his name. In Houston, Texas, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, elementary schools have been named for him, as has a Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter in Los Angeles.

An auditorium on the campus of Huston-Tillotson College in Austin is dedicated to his memory. In Chicago, the Doris Miller Foundation honors persons who make significant contributions to racial understanding. (Doris Miller Memorial) In Honolulu, there is a Doris Miller Loop, just mauka of the airport. (There are many more memorials to Doris Miller.)

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Admiral Chester Nimitz presenting the Navy Cross to Doris Miller

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Miller speaking during a visit to the Naval Training Station, Great Lakes, Illinois, on 7 January 1943-80-G-294808

Miller speaking with sailors and a civilian at Naval Station Great Lakes, January 7, 1943

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May 23, 2016 by Peter T Young 6 Comments

William Francis James

“Dear Doctor (James) – I have taken this opportunity to express my heartiest appreciation and many thanks for the good treatment that I received at your hands while at the hospital for the last past three months.”

“I am enjoying sound health at present owing to your skilful medical attention given me and which I never, will forget.” (Hawaiian Star, December 7, 1909)
On the continent, the idea of unified, correlated national health services had been germinating slowly since the epidemic of yellow fever in 1793. Fast forward about a century … State Boards of Health were being organized in rapid succession.

In 1874 the National Association of State Health Commissioners was formed, and the obvious need for a central federal health agency became more and more apparent. Then in 1879, a National Board of Health was created.

In 1872, the small island off Iwilei in Honolulu Harbor – “Kamokuʻākulikuli” – became the site of a quarantine station used to handle the influx of immigrant laborers drawn to the islands’ developing sugar plantations.

The site is described as “little more than a raised platform of sand and pilings to house the station, with walkways leading to the harbor edge wharf, where a concrete sea wall had been constructed” and as “a low, swampy area on a reef in the harbor”. (Hawaiian Gazette, March 23, 1881)

By 1888, Kamokuʻākulikuli Island had been expanded and was known as “Quarantine Island.” If vessels arrived at the harbor after 15 days at sea and contagious disease was aboard, quarantine and disinfecting procedures were required at Quarantine Island. (Cultural Surveys)

At the request of the Territorial authorities an officer of the United States Public Health Service was detailed for duty as sanitary adviser to the Governor of Hawaii. (Journal of Public Health, 1913)

The work of the Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service in Hawaii was divided into four sections: quarantine operations; plague-preventive measures; immigration inspection; and marine-hospital relief.

“At Honolulu the service has a first-class quarantine and disinfecting station with a wharf capable of accommodating vessels of 35 feet draft. The quarantine station has accommodations for 75 cabin and 600 steerage passengers in the regular quarters and barracks.”

“In addition there are tent platforms of United States Army Regulation, 14 by 15 size, which can be made available at short notice for 1,280 soldiers, with the cooperation of the Quartermaster Department of the Army or of the Hawaiian National Guard. There is also tentage capacity on the island for at least as many more troops or other persons.”

“At Hilo the service maintains a second-class quarantine and disinfecting station with facilities for fumigating vessels by the sulphur-pot method. There is as yet no provision for handling numbers of persons in quarantine except on shipboard or by arrangement with the board of health for use of its quarters temporarily.”

“At the subports of Mahukona, Kahului, Lāhainā, Port Allen and Kōloa acting assistant surgeons of the service board and inspect incoming vessels.” (Surgeon General Annual Report, 1911)

Dredged materials from improvements to Honolulu harbor had enlarged Quarantine Island again and by 1906 the island was encircled by a seawall and was 38-acres. By 1908 the Quarantine Station consisted of Quarantine Island and the reclaimed land of the Quarantine wharf (with a causeway connecting the two.)

Quarantine Island (what is now referred to as Sand Island) became the largest United States quarantine station of the period, accommodating 2,255-individuals. This facility included two hospitals and a crematorium. (Cultural Surveys)

One of its residents was William Francis James. James was born in Darwhar, Bombay Presidency, India, November 11, 1860, the son of Cornelius Francis and Caroline Sophia James.

Dr William Francis James was married to Sarah Ellen “Helen” Robinson in San Antonio, Texas on June 16 1886. The couple were parents to eight children: William Walter James, Francis “Frank” Leicester James, Stella James, Caroline Ella “Cherie” James Morren, Sophie Ethel James Fase, Gracie James, Naomi James Jacobson Hart and Ruth James Lord. (Schnuriger)

James was a graduate physician (Tulane, 1893) and surgeon in private practice since 1888 in San Antonio Texas. He enlisted in the US Army in the Rough Riders, 1st Volunteer Cavalry during Spanish American War in 1898 and then came to the Islands in 1903 to work for the Public Health Service; his salary was $200 per month.

His duty as Acting Assistant Surgeon required him to board vessels wanting to enter the port of Honolulu and examine their passengers and crew and ascertain if there are any diseases there among that would prevent the vessel from entering the port. (US Circuit Court of Appeals)

“(W)e treat free of charge all sailors on United States boats, and also hospital treatment and outdoor patients treatment, and boarding vessels for the purpose of examining the crew and passengers on board the boats as to their health, and contagious diseases especially.” (James)

His services went beyond medicine … “Voicing the unanimous sentiment of the Japanese community, the members of the Japanese Hotel Union of Honolulu desire to express their deep appreciation of the heroic act …”

“… by which a Japanese woman, Sei Shibata, was saved by you from drowning in Honolulu harbor on the 23rd of September, 1912.” (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, October 3, 1912)

“Plunging into waters infested with sharks, Acting Assistant Surgeon WF James, of the public health service, stationed at Honolulu, rescued a Japanese woman from drowning on September 23.”

“The Young brothers’ launch Water-witch with visiting newspapermen was soon at the scene, and the woman and her brave rescuers were hauled aboard. From the launch they were transferred to the ‘Korea.’ Drs Trotter and James worked over the woman for some time before she was restored to consciousness.” (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, September 24, 1912)

“(James) was lauded for bravery by Secretary of the Treasury MacVeagh, who yesterday called attention to his ‘humanitarian and unselfish action.’ Dr James was formerly a Roosevelt Rough Rider.” (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 4, 1912) He died May 23, 1944 in Honolulu.

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