Land company chief rebuilt Keaau

Roy Shipman Blackshear, the retired president of kamaaina Big Island land company W.H. Shipman Ltd., died Tuesday at the family home on Reed's Island in Hilo. He was 83.

The Shipman family land holdings were established in the late 19th century. Income came mostly from leasing them for sugar production.

Blackshear became president of the company in 1976, and shortly afterward in the early 1980s, Puna Sugar Co. went out of business, cutting off income to the family company.

Blackshear responded by rebuilding the decaying Keaau town, creating Keaau Town Center shopping area and developing W.H. Shipman Business Park. He retired in 1994.

He graduated from Punahou School, New Mexico Military Institute and the University of Hawaii, and served in the Army Air Force during World War II.

Before joining the family company as a vice president in 1974, he worked for Hawaiian Telephone Co. for several years, building a collection of antique telephones. He was an amateur radio operator and liked to build electronic equipment, despite the fact that his color-blindness made it difficult to distinguish color-coding on components, said daughter Barbara Ann Andersen.

Of part-Hawaiian ancestry, he carried on the work begun by his uncle Herbert C. Shipman of saving the nene goose. Hilo public relations man Walt Southward remember a time when he took a television reporter to Blackshear's estate on the Puna coast and about 20 nene, rare anywhere else on the island, mobbed the reporter.

Since nene goslings were subject to attack by the native Hawaiian hawk, also an endangered species, Blackshear would frequently run out of the house to shoo hawks away, Southward said.

Andersen said her father was a kind man, but not physically affectionate in her childhood. In recent years, he developed non-Alzheimer's dementia associated with Parkinson's disease, she said. A positive result was that he hugged her a lot in his final years, she said.

Services will be at 10 a.m. Jan. 6 at Haili Church. Friends may call from 9 a.m. Burial is private.

Blackshear is survived by sister Walter Beryl, daughters Joan Blackshear-Leach and Barbara Ann Andersen, and two grandchildren.