Hawaii’s World
IN the year of statehood, 1959, author James Michener said in an article contributed to the Star-Bulletin that Sally Sheehan ought to be named Hawaii's Woman of the Year. A Democrat from her innermost fiber, she had just completed a volunteer public relations effort for John A. Burns, who had been narrowly defeated for governor. Ed Sheehan
journalism scholarshipMichener quoted an admiring Republican as saying that Sheehan single-handedly had come close to matching the output of 40 paid professional publicity helpers on the winning side.
That was one of her few times in the spotlight. Usually she worked to turn it on PR clients or her husband, Ed Sheehan, one of Hawaii's most masterful writers. Ed died in 1992.
Now she is turning a final spotlight on him. She will bequeath $200,000 to the University of Hawaii-Manoa on her death to set up the Ed Sheehan Scholarship Endowment in Journalism, the biggest of six memorials assisting UH communications students.
Gavan Daws, co-author with Ed Sheehan of "The Hawaiians," admires how he, without even finishing high school, educated himself by reading at a second-hand bookstore on Nuuanu Avenue and came to know, even before he knew he could write and speak and act with Irish flair, that he had "an appetite -- a lifelong hunger -- for good words in print."
Boston-born in 1918, Daws says, Sheehan grew up tall, skinny and poor in the Depression and one day saw an ad recruiting sheet metal worker's helpers for Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii. Ed knew something about that. His father was a sheet metal worker.
His room in a frame cottage on a narrow lane in Waikiki was before traffic lights and any need to lock doors. He wrote: "The evenings were dark and tender, with silences broken by ukuleles and girls' laughter, and street-lights filtering lace shadows on near-empty sidewalks. Sleep came sweetly and in the morning there was always the call of the flower lady."
The Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack, nearly tore in half the destroyer USS Downes on which Sheehan had been working. He helped lay out the dead and wounded and heard sailors entombed in the USS Oklahoma tapping helplessly on the metal walls behind which they died.
He later wrote about it in "Days of '41: Pearl Harbor Remembered," still available at the USS Arizona Museum and other locations. Other Sheehan books, besides "The Hawaiians" with Daws, were "Honolulu," "Kahala" and a novel about the time of King Kamehameha I, "The Guns of Eden."
As a writer he drew even more attention for travel articles, often nationally syndicated. For 22 years he hosted an afternoon radio program, "Pau Hana," starting in the days when Honolulu had only two radio stations and sometimes broadcasting from a tree in the International Market Place.
In London, where he and Sally later lived for about half of each year, he became good friends with actor Laurence Olivier and author James Clavell, fellow residents of their apartment complex. Perhaps most valued was his 20-year friendship with author John Steinbeck. His memorial piece on Steinbeck done for the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post Syndicate was reprinted nationwide.
It was my pleasure to be one of Sheehan's friends, to spot him on his predawn walks just by his craggy stride, to catch up with him and to exchange jokes that evoked hearty laughs, his version of the morning call of the flower lady.
He will not be replicated but the Ed Sheehan scholarship may help some future word craftsmen and artists to better hone skills he developed with no college help.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.