The Save Outdoor Sculpture registry, kept at the Mayor's Office on Culture and the Arts, often doesn't include pieces placed at churches or in graveyards, because they are by nature private memorials instead of public works. ‘Shining Hour’
honors a free spirit
Still, there are works that are clearly the work of a master craftsman. One, for example, is the "Shining Hour" work by sculptor Bumpei Akaji in a small courtyard at Central Union Church.
It resembles a flock of birds rising above mountains, and is dated 1966, a period when Akaji was heavily into the bird oeuvre, like his larger work at Ala Moana Center.
This piece has a small plaque that reads "In Loving Memory, Jeffrey Taylor Dodge, 1954 - 1967."
Dodge was 12, an enthusiastic but still-learning surfer whose mother Nina was renting a house on Diamond Head Road. The boy and some friends went surfing off Waikiki on July 16, 1967, and when Nina Dodge returned from dinner at 8 p.m. she learned that Jeffrey was missing.
She Dodge went with friends to check Waikiki's beaches for Jeffrey and they informed police at 10 p.m. that the boy had vanished. Police and fire-rescue crews worked into the evening, calling out a helicopter and dropping flares. A battered surfboard was discovered.
Jeffrey's body was found the next morning by a fireman walking along a seawall. The boy was the 29th drowning victim of 1967, which equaled the number for all drownings the year before. The boy had become a statistic.
Jeffrey's father was a prominent Los Angeles neurosurgeon, and his grandfather was Texas oil millionaire Robert Neal. The family purchased the Akaji statue as a memorial to the boy's spirit.
Burl Burlingame, Star-Bulletin