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Hawaii’s World
LAST week, after I turned 80, I realized that if I couldn't find the Fountain of Youth I could at least seek a few clues from a youthful 94-year-old -- former Sen. Hiram L. Fong. Ageless Hiram Fong
cultivates lifeWe met at his office in the Finance Factors tower on upper Bishop Street. The firm had nine founders. He and Daniel Lau survive.
He is chairman of the board and still on the job from 8 to noon every weekday.
Then, maybe after a business lunch, he drives himself to Senator Fong's Plantation Gardens, a first-rate visitor attraction he has created.
It is a nature garden of 725 acres (one 527th of Oahu, he told me). It extends to the Koolau mountain top at 2,600 feet elevation, which he calls King Lunalilo Heights. This looks out to Kaneohe Bay and down on valleys, a plateau, gardens and wooded areas, which he has named for the five presidents under whom he served over 17 years in the U.S. Senate -- Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. He expresses no preference, respects them all.
Heart bypass surgery six years ago helped rejuvenate Fong. He works afternoons and weekends in the garden. He plants, digs, sweeps and trims as needed. Even when he was a senator, he told me, his favorite way to relax was to pull weeds.
It leaves him amazingly healthy and mentally alert, also helps him stay calm, relaxed and in good humor.
This self-made politician and businessman never has smoked, drunk liquor, not even beer, or sipped coffee. "Soda water is my weakness," he said.
Though he is the only U.S. senator of Chinese ancestry and still widely honored in Asia, he didn't speak or read Chinese until a few years ago.
The break came when the Mun Lun Chinese language high school gave him an honorary degree and he felt guilty. He bought self-instruction books for Cantonese, the language of Southern China. He now speaks it a bit and understands 80 percent of what he reads in Cantonese newspapers.
Among his Senate accomplishments was to bring equal treatment for Asians under U.S. immigration laws.
He also is proud to have gotten Hawaii included in the interstate highway system, with its hefty support grants, even though we are an offshore state. He went into the Senate with statehood and is the only Republican sent there from Hawaii.
I have known Fong since 1946 and marvel at his ability to do venturesome things yet relax and not hold grudges. His wife, Ellyn, told me he always is a sound sleeper. He says it's because he's a fatalist -- what will be will be. Ellyn, 89, still plays tennis three times a week.
They live in the same Alewa Drive home they bought before World War II.
Fong had a famous one-punch public fight years ago with hot-headed Charles Kauhane, his Democratic rival for speaker of the territorial House of Representatives. Kauhane made the swing. No grudges. When Kauhane's wife died, Kauhane asked Fong to deliver the eulogy.
Visitors to Senator Fong's Plantation and Gardens include some 250 from Japan each day. A three-mile, one-hour tram ride takes them as high as a 500-foot level view point and over the entire property with a wide variety of plantings. Many call it the high spot of their Hawaii visit.
The gardens are reached by driving one mile north from the Hygienic Store in Windward Oahu, then turning left on Pulama Road at Kahaluu. They lie at its end.
Fong has passed ownership of the gardens to his 10 grandchildren. He will come back and haunt them, he chuckles, if they ever try to change the gardens from their present use.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.