ANTHONY SOMMER / TSOMMER@STARBULLETIN.COM Left to right: Walter "Kamika" Smith III, Charlotte Smith, Emily Smith (mother of Walter II and Charlotte) and Walter "Freckles" Smith II take five in the botanical garden at Smith's Tropical Paradise.

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Family stamps Hawaii
heritage with its own

A tour boat operator wrote
his clan's story by telling Kauai's

The story of the Smith family begins in 1946, when Walter Smith took a group of tourists up the Wailua River in his rowboat (using a borrowed outboard motor) to tour Fern Grotto.

Today, the third generation of Smiths is running the company, and the fourth is playing ukulele on the family's huge 157-passenger motor barges that carry visitors up to Fern Grotto all day, every day.

What Smith began with his wife Emily, who presides as matriarch of the clan, his son Walter "Freckles" Smith II and grandson Walter "Kamika" Smith III have expanded.

Walter I died in 1970 without seeing the business fully expanded. It now includes what many consider Kauai's best luau in a tropical botanical garden of stunning beauty. The luaus host up to 400 guests a night, three nights a week.

The Smith family is mostly ethnic Hawaiian, with a little bit of everything else married in. The Smith name is from a long-ago English ancestor.

Much of the land it occupies is leased from the state.

Smith's Tropical Paradise, as the business is called, is closed to the public on weekends. That's when it frequently is used for private parties.

"My husband had good foresight," said Emily Smith. "He started with that little boat, and when he started building big boats, people kept asking, 'What you need that for?'

"Well, he knew what he was doing," she laughed.

Emily Smith said her husband was a born storyteller and loved having a captive audience on the boat rides up to Fern Grotto.

When it rained and the boats weren't running, he would regale the office staff with his tales. "Nobody got any work done on rainy days," she recalled.

Freckles Smith, who took over the business from his father, is best known as Kauai's ambassador of tourism. Following the devastation of Hurricane Iniki, he journeyed to tourism conventions all over the world to convince travel agents that the damage had been repaired and Kauai was very much open for business.

He is most proud of the fact that the company's tour boats and luaus have served as the first venue for many performers who later became major stars in Hawaii.

"Most of the entertainers in Honolulu started out on our boats," Freckles Smith said. "We do just Hawaiian music, and nothing else."

But that doesn't mean they don't tailor the music to fit the audience.

"The older folks like 'Sweet Leilani,' so that's what we play for them," he said.

"More than any other people, Hawaiian people like to share their culture," he noted.

Freckles' son, Walter "Kamika" Smith III, agreed.

"That's what makes us magic. What we've seen in recent years is that people come to Hawaii for a real Hawaiian experience.

"There are lots of resorts in the world with beautiful beaches and grand hotels. They could go to any of those places, but they chose Hawaii," said Kamika Smith.

The result has been that, in addition to the tradition of providing music, the family's programs have become more and more interpretive.

"On the boat tours, visitors see many rock walls along the banks of the Wailua. When we explain to them that those are ancient heiau - temples -- they go, 'Wow.' And that's the reaction we want."