Edwards biographer looking for fellow fans

Do you remember Webley Edwards and "Hawaii Calls"? If you do, Allen Roy would like to hear from you.

Webley Edwards created the radio show "Hawaii Calls" to bring Hawaiian music to an international audience.

Roy, a former Hawaii resident now living in Montana, is working on a biography of Edwards and the iconic radio show he created.

"Hawaii Calls" presented authentic Hawaiian music played by Hawaii residents in Hawaii to a worldwide audience. It aired live from Waikiki every week for 40 years; the inaugural broadcast on July 3, 1935, was the first of more than 2,000 shows. At its peak, "Hawaii Calls" was heard by millions via 750 radio stations in North America, Central America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Roy, 58, was in that audience.

"Back in the late '50s and early '60s, when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, it made Hawaii seem like a dreamy, heavenly place," he says.

Roy later attended Hawaiian Mission Academy ("My classmates would know me as Cecil Roy Jr."), but, like many other Hawaii residents of his generation, never attended a "Hawaii Calls" show.

"The school choir occasionally sang on the program, but I wasn't in the choir. My Saturdays were full up, but I think it was also a teenager thing that kept me from attending if I could have."

Edwards retired for health reasons in 1972 and died in 1977. "Hawaii Calls" went off the air in 1975 after the Hawaii Visitors Bureau ended its financial support.

Thirty years later, Edwards is almost forgotten.

"I am continually surprised how many people I meet who don't know anything at all about 'Hawaii Calls,'" says Roy, whose interest in Edwards was piqued when he came across a recording of a 1949 broadcast.

A search of the Internet established that there wasn't much information available on Edwards or "Hawaii Calls" and that no one had done a biography of Edwards or a show-by-show history of the program.

Roy says he also discovered that some of the information currently available online is inaccurate.

"I realized that perhaps I could do a biography of Webley and 'Hawaii Calls,' because no one else ever had."

And so Roy is compiling "a bibliography of everything I can find," including the news reports Edwards filed as a CBS war correspondent and a "Hawaii Calls" script he gave to a relative.

Roy has also contacted some of the surviving "Hawaii Calls" entertainers and the children of others who performed on the show during its 40-year run. And he's looking for photographs, news clippings and other memorabilia.

"There is so much to learn. I'd like to be able to show who played on what program, what songs were sung, who and when there were famous guests," he says.

"I've been making headway, but the more people I can talk to, the better."

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