THE LEI SELLERS ASSOCIATION
During the war, tourism was virtually non-existent. Scenes of Matson ships pulling into Honolulu Harbor with their decks lined with tourists throwing coins in the water and watching local boys dive deep to get them, were over. The romantic vision of hula girls lining the gangway, and lines of lei sellers offering lei of plumeria was only a memory.
So what did the lei sellers do during the war?
A few were able to still sell lei in Waikiki fine restaurants or new social hot spots that sprung up during the war (among them the Wisteria on Hausten Street), but most found work elsewhere.
In the 1940’s Oahu was a place where everybody really did know everyone else, and a young Army officer who happened to be a long time friend of the vice-president of the Lei Sellers Association, matched these skilled workers with the Army’s needs. And that’s how fifty “boat girl lei sellers” became employed by the U.S. Army to weave camouflage nets.
It was Lieutenant Arthur Chun, a long time friend of the Makaiwi family, who approached Agnes Makaiwi about the project. Agnes Makaiwi happened to be one of the founders of the Lei Sellers Association (1933) and its first vice-president. To add more island-networking to this story, the Lei Sellers Association’s first president was Mokihana Amona. Mokihana’s son was Bill Amona, an attorney who represented the Lei Sellers in their dealings with the Legislature.
(A little side note here. That romantic vision of cruise ship tourists being offered flower garlands by gracious lei sellers didn’t always match the reality. In fact, Martina Macalino, Agnes Makaiwi’s daughter, remembers her mother’s stories. “When tourists came in, some of them [lei sellers] used to shove leis up to their face. Everybody was crowding and pushing.” The competition among lei sellers was so fierce that Police Chief Gabrielson frequently sent officers to the docks to break up fights among the women. Macalino said, “The police constantly threatened to arrest the lei sellers for ‘harassment of tourists’ but they rarely did.”)
One of the purposes of forming the Lei Sellers Association was to bring order to the dock, another was to act as an official channel of communication between the Police Department and the lei sellers.
But during the attack of Oahu, the lei sellers were among the first to come forward to volunteer. According to Makaiwi’s daughter, “On the morning of December 7, minutes after the attack, my mother went to the Red Cross Canteen at Iolani Palace to volunteer. The owner of Lau Yee Chai’s Chinese restaurant, P.Y. Chong, took charge of the kitchen. Chong assigned my mother the job of cooking rice. . . There were quite a few ‘boat girls’ there.”
“Then a few weeks later, they came to get my mother. What’s his name? That hapa-haole, [part-Caucasian] Arthur Chun—smart boy. He graduated from the university [University of Hawaii], you know. He was a colonel….He needed a forelady and women to work in the net factory. So he went to see my mother. He knew she could get the lei sellers to work at the plant.”
When Chun approached Makaiwi about the jobs, she said she would speak to Mr. George Moody who would be supervising the net factory. When she did, she negotiated a hard bargain. In the end, Moody agreed to hire all the “boat” girls, including the older women. “That’s how the lei sellers from the boat all worked camouflage. The strong women did the heavy, more physically taxing weaving.”
The women’s work consisted of turning rags into nets. Bales of rags, scraps of burlap bags and brightly colored clothes were collected by the community and brought to the factory. The women cut the rags in half, then into strips. The next step was to dye the strips green and brown, and finally, they twined the strips through fish netting. The patterns that the strips had to be woven followed blueprints which were designed by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The nets the women worked on averaged twenty by forty feet and weighed over 100 pounds. Often the women hung the nets on clothesline-like lines and wove the nets from under them. According to Macalino, her mother told her, “It was easier, but very hot.”
By the third week in January 1942, less than seven weeks after the attack, the workers completed 400 nets.
In January 1942, the Honolulu Star Bulletin reported that “somewhere on Oahu, lei sellers are busy making camouflage nets to hide the army’s gun emplacements… from the enemy’s planes.”
The secret location of the net factory was on the grounds of Kamehameha School near the dairy. According to Major J.M. McMahon, of the U.S. Engineer Corps, besides the 50 lei sellers, 100 other women and a few men were employed on the project. McMahon said, “Of these 99% were Hawaiian.”
Among the Hawaiian women who worked there was Mary Kaiwena Pukui, cultural historian and translator at the Bishop Museum. Pukui can be seen standing in the photo at the end of this article.
After the war, the tourism industry rebounded and the lei sellers returned to welcoming cruise ships. These days, the Honolulu Airport parking lot has a specially designated area for Lei Stands, and lei can be easily purchased from grocery stores, flower shops, and lei shops on Mauankea Street in Chinatown.
Photos: University of Hawaii War Records Depository. Resources used: Ka Po`e kau lei: An oral history of Hawai`i’s Lei sellers. Interview with Martina Macalino done on October 9, 1985 by Iwalani Hodges. University of Hawaii Center for Oral History. Honolulu Star Bulletin January 29, 1942. page 1.
The photo under the title of this website is of the Lei Sellers during World War II. Note the nets in the background.
