FEATURE:

True Grit

Carole Kai will never forget the day in the early 1980s when she walked into a bank in downtown Honolulu seeking kokua for the Carole Kai Bed Race, an event she had founded in 1974 to benefit the Variety School of Hawaii for children with learning disabilities. She was hoping the bank would sponsor a bed for $500.

In 1979, Kai welcomed her mother to the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas where she was the opening act for Don Rickles.

“As soon as the secretary saw me, she said, ‘Oh, you’re such a pest!’” recalls Kai. “She told me to wait, and then I heard her tell her boss, ‘That pest is back here again.’ His reply was, ‘Aaahhh, just tell her to go away.’ It was embarrassing. I left crying and thinking, I don’t need this!”

But Kai, 62, persevered. She produced the Bed Race for 20 years and launched another charity event, the Great Aloha Run, to boot. Today, as the Great Aloha Run ramps up for its 23rd year (Hawaiian Telcom is in the second year of a three-year title sponsorship), she remains totally committed to philanthropy and no longer frets about being rejected. “People can laugh at me or turn me down, it doesn’t bother me,” she says. “I’m not doing this for myself.”

Says Carol Jaxon, the Great Aloha Run’s race director, “Carole cares so much about the people of Hawaii. She’s a businesswoman, yet she brings her compassion to every meeting. She’s so passionate about the event, and it’s infectious.”

Above: Kai congratulates two participants for being among the first to cross the finish line of a recent Great Aloha Run. Opposite page: It’s not often that you’ll find Kai sitting still. Photo by Raymond Wong.

Kimo Kahoano, Kai’s co-host on “Hawaii Stars,” the local version of “American Idol” aired on KHON, concurs. “The whole time that I’ve known Carole—and we go back to the 1960s when I was in Waikiki doing shows—she has been a person with a lot of get-up-and-go. She works hard to help the community. It’s tremendous to see this amazing woman use the best of her abilities at whatever she does.”

The youngest of three children, Kai was born Carole Shimizu on October 28, 1944 at St. Louis School, which was serving as a World War II army hospital back then. When she was five, her family moved from McCully to a home next to McKinley High School.

Her mother, Ethel Shizue Akamine, was a single parent who owned her own business, Kapiolani Barber Shop. Although she worked constantly, the family often hovered on the brink of poverty. Kai and her older siblings, Harvey and Doris, however, never knew it.

“We always had food on the table,” Kai recalls. “We always wore decent clothes. But I didn’t join the Girl Scouts because my mom couldn’t afford to buy me the uniform, and when I was a kid I remember looking up at Tantalus and wondering, What are the rich people eating? What are the rich people wearing?”

Kai displayed poise and charm even at the tender age of five.

Akamine, who died in 1999, taught Kai the value of hard work and instilled in her the confidence to accomplish whatever she wanted to do. “She overcame tremendous odds,” says Kai. “At one time, we were going to lose our house because my mother was behind on mortgage payments. She went to the president of American Savings & Loan and said, ‘I’m an honest woman, and I promise that I will pay you $500 a month until I finish paying the debt.’ He believed in her, and that’s what she did.”

From the time she was young, Kai nurtured a love for music. She started taking piano lessons when she was in kindergarten, and used to dance to the hits of the Platters, the Lettermen, Vicki Carr, and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme while cleaning the house.

As a ninth-grader at Washington Intermediate School, Kai was voted the “Most Talented” student, a distinction that she won again the next year as a sophomore at McKinley High School. She went on to the University of Hawaii at Manoa where she earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1966. Kai was accepted by two prestigious colleges—the Chicago Conservatory of Music and the Indiana School of Music—but she decided instead to take a detour to Japan to work as a model.

“I was in Japan when the Richard Speck case was happening in Chicago,” Kai says. “He murdered eight student nurses there, and I was thinking about going to school in Chicago! I was already homesick, and called my mother and said, ‘I don’t want to go! I just want to come home!’”

Kai returned to Honolulu and began working the entertainment circuit. The late 1960s to the early 1980s, she says, were the golden years for local entertainers. “There were over 40 bands in Waikiki, all working every night and all making money,” she says. “I’d work every night, and afterward, my friends and I would go see the Don Ho or Society of Seven show.”

An ebullient performer, Kai enjoyed a long career in entertainment that included a stint at the Guam Hilton in 1984. She returned to Hawaii later that year, and made charity work the focal point of her life.

By 1979, Kai was doing well enough to land a contract with a management group affiliated with legendary “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson. She was the opening act for headliners in Las Vegas and Reno, and was named that year as the “Most Promising Newcomer of the Year” by one of the city’s dailies. Her managers offered her a $5,000-per-week retainer, and they planned to put her on “Hollywood Squares” and other TV shows, schedule concerts and capitalize on her exotic looks à la Rita Moreno.

But Kai was miserable. “They wanted me to meet a lot of influential men, including one from the Frontier Hotel, but when I asked if I could bring my Grandma Ewing, the wonderful haole grandmother of a friend of mine whom I was living with at the time, they snickered and said, ‘No! Let us remind you you’re a female singer and female singers are a dime a dozen.’ After I heard that, I got really depressed. I was a newborn Christian so our values clashed.”

Kai sought the advice of an entertainment critic who had given her a positive review. He calmly listened to her frustrations, then shook his head. “You’re not the kind of person who has the killer instinct,” he said. “All the girls I know who became big stars had to claw their way up, and they would do anything to succeed. You’re more of a flower. You have to go back to Hawaii and find your happiness there because you’re not going to be happy here.”

Looking back, Kai says, “He gave me very good advice. I wasn’t comfortable with the lifestyle demands there, and I made my decision. I went home.”

Kai married in 1982, and resumed her show biz career for a brief time in Los Angeles and Lake Tahoe as a duo with Kevin I (Iwamoto). Two years later, she divorced and returned to Hawaii for good, realizing charity work was her real calling.

She produced the Carole Kai Bed Race until 1994 when she decided to focus on the Great Aloha Run, which she and Honolulu Marathon founder Dr. Jack Scaff started in 1985 with a $1-million endowment from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, the run’s Benefactor Sponsor.

“Buck Buchwach, who was executive editor of The Honolulu Advertiser at the time, came up with the idea,” Kai says. “It was his dream to start a race called the Great Aloha Run that went from Aloha Tower into Aloha Stadium.”

It debuted with 11,683 participants, making it the largest first-time running event in the world (about 22,000 people are expected to participate this year). To date, the annual Presidents’ Day race, which Runners’ World magazine has recognized as one of the “Top 100 Road Races,” has raised nearly $7 million for over 100 nonprofit organizations and community groups in Hawaii, including United Cerebral Palsy, Multiple Sclerosis Society, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Variety School of Hawaii. It is the only race of its size to donate over $190,000 each year to at least 27 community organizations.

Kai is quick to credit the 4,000 volunteers who help implement the event. “I’m not proud of the race, I’m proud of the people,” she says. “I could never do it without such caring, capable individuals.” Dozens of businesses also have stepped up to the plate and donated money, manpower and merchandise, including Founding Sponsor The Honolulu Advertiser and Kamaaina Sponsors Roberts Hawaii, Hawaiian Electric Industries, The Queen’s Medical Center and Commercial Plumbing, Inc.
What fuels Kai’s philanthropic spirit? “My mother always told me, ‘You have to give back to the community so the well doesn’t run dry,’” she says. “She’d tell me, ‘You can’t keep taking from the well. You have to put something back.’”

In her rare moments of free time, Kai enjoys traveling with entrepreneur Eddie Onouye, her high school sweetheart whom she married in 1987. To keep in shape, she works out with trainer Eric Okamura at Fit for Life three times a week.

As for the future, Kai won’t be completely out of the entertainment realm. “Hawaii Stars” was slated to end its 12-year run last year, but she reveals that won’t be so. “KHON would like to see us extend it so we’re going to do it one more year,” she says. “I can’t share any details right now, but I can say we’re going to add a really exciting new twist to it.”

The sparkle in her eyes shows that the effervescent Kai is ready for tomorrow and whatever new challenges and opportunities it is sure to bring. “I’m grateful for every day that I live,” she says. “Every day, I thank God and ask Him to give me the strength to do the right thing. I’m not the smartest, best-looking or richest person, but if I can inspire just two people to help fill the wells in our communities, then I’ll be happy.”

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