Mirage

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My first "boss" was a movie star.

Um, well ... that may be a tiny bit of a stretch, but he did come from Southern California. And really, he looked like a movie star, tanned, muscled, bearded and fresh to Kailua-Kona from the mainland. He was a creative, an artisan/entrepreneur/actor who played a part in the 1958 musical, "South Pacific." His name was Geno Bergmann.

My family was fresh to Kona, too, but we were fresh from Kailua, O'ahu -- me, my three sisters, my mother and her third husband, John, who also looked like a movie star. My sisters took a plane to the Big Island, but mom, John and I came over on John's brand new deep-sea charter fishing boat, a sleek 38-foot haole sampan.

Day after day, I wandered around Kailua town, dazzled by its pristine beauty, its long curved sea wall that I could walk on and gaze down into the water below, and a fleet of fishing boats moored in the calm baby blue bay. Many times walking through the village, I stopped by the small grass-shack kiosk that Geno had built just across from what was then the buzzing Kona Inn. Geno carved polynesian tikis out of coconut tree trunks or some kind of fern and sold them to tourists. Tikis are statues that represent mana, or powers of various polynesian gods -- gods of wisdom, prosperity, knowledge and more. I was fascinated by Geno's work and weaseled my way into his graces so he'd show me how to carve them, too.

I was in my early teens, and Geno was in his early twenties. He could very easily have taken me for an annoying pest (which I very well may have been), but he treated me with kindness, generosity and respect. Not only that, he gave me a hammer and chisel and let me try carving tikis alongside him. I did manage to make a few, but they were awful. Geno, however, never pointed that out.

He had other things going on, as well, and he hired me to take charge of one of them, my first real paid job. What he had in mind had nothing to do with carving terrible tikis, and everything to do with something I loved -- the ocean. He had this mini glass-bottomed catamaran, and he came up with this business of taking tourists out on it and puttering them around the bay. He kept it in a small cove on the back side of the pier, which later became the site of the King Kamehameha Hotel, which, of course, utterly destroyed the inland fish ponds and historic tranquility of that cove. But that's another story.

The mini catamaran had a glass-bottom box between its two hulls where you could look down and see all manner of underwater sea life -- coral, sand, shells, small stingrays, eels, sea slugs, spiky wana, stick fish and a massive array of colorful darting fish -- a tropical goldmine far richer then than what one might see there today. My job was to take one or two tourists out at a time and give them a sight-seeing tour, while doing my best to narrate what we were looking at through the glass. I also had to troll the beach to market my service. That was not easy. I wasn't good at drumming up business. I managed to snag a few tourists, but mostly Geno sent them over from his tiki shack.

The first thing I had to do was learn the names of as many fish as I could. So I got a booklet on Hawaiian fish, then took the catamaran out and checked what kinds were out there and fumbled around until I found them in the book. I learned a few names, but I was way too antsy to learn them all. Humuhumunukunukuapua'a was easy. I had that one down already. Pretty much anyone growing up in Hawaii learns that one early in life. But I wanted more tongue twisters, which I figured would wow tourists into giving me good tips. I found two more: kikakapunukunuku'oi'oi and Lauwiliwilinukunuku'oi'oi. Ho! Good ones! They took a couple of days to flow like honey off my lips. But I got them down, and boy, did they impress my customers! At least once on every trip out, I slipped off the boat and swam around under the glass, holding my breath as long as I possibly could and bringing various things up to show them under the glass. I loved doing that! I got so good at it I could have played a part on Sea Hunt. I remember one nice lady from England was so impressed she gave me a five-dollar tip!

But in the end, I wasn't all that great at finding customers, and ended up making little more than pocket change for Geno and myself. But I will never forget that job, my very first. Nor have I forgotten Geno's gentle hand, guiding me into the whole notion of working for pay.

Geno went on to become one of Hawaii's most revered and sought after Hawaiian rock wall builders. An artisan and a gentleman. He still lives on the island today, and still does his art. How could he not? I understand his drive to create. It never dies. It’s who he is. It’s who I am, as well.

I am honored to have sprouted a few shoots in the cast of his artistic shadow, learning the value of art, entrepreneurialism and work at such an early age. It has served me well, indeed.

Mahalo, boss! You da bess.