My dad, John M. Lind, arrived in Honolulu on May 1, 1939. He was 25 years old, and was sent to work in the local office of San Francisco-based Dohrmann Hotel Supply Company. His assignment was to drum up business with the rapidly expanding network of military food service operations, most around the island of Oahu.
In his first few months, he made the rounds. Fort DeRussy and Fort Ruger in town, Tripler Hospital, Pearl Harbor, Hickam, Schofield, Wheeler. The latter put Wahiawa on his regular route.
He also immediately got involved with the Junior Chamber of Commerce, as he had done previously in Long Beach, California. Those JCC contacts apparently served him quite well, as he didn’t retire from the business of supplying goods to Hawaii’s hotels and restaurants soon after his 85th birthday.
Here’s one of his photos, with his handwritten caption. The photo was taken in Michel Martin’s first restaurant, located in Wahiawa. In later years, his Michel’s at the Colony Surf became synonymous with fine dining.
Those in the photo were Ralph Olson, who owned and operated the Top Hat Bar in Wahiawa. Ralph was very active in the Wahiawa community, and in 1944 ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for a seat on the Honolulu Board of Supervisors (the predecessor of today’s City Council). Next is my dad, John Lind. Then someone he identifies only as “Perry,” and I haven’t managed to discover more. To his right are Martin, and on the far right is Charley Crabb of Wahiawa, who married a good friend of my mother’s in that same year.
Fast forward 64 years. In 2003, Michel Martin became one of the first few inducted into the Hawaii Culinary Hall of Fame, and honored at a gala banquet at Leeward Community College.
Here’s a photo of Martin with my dad at the event.
Martin died in 2008 at age 100. My dad was just short of his 97th birthday when he died in late 2010.
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That is amazing. I didn’t know Martin died at age 100. Must have been due to the French cuisine. Your father was a handsome man.
My father worked for Hawaiian Pine (later Dole) in Wahiawa in the late 40s & into the 50s and 60s. He frequently mentioned to my mother (and we kids overheard) that he and colleagues had had lunch at “Mike’s” . . . Michel Martin’s first (and pretty humble) cafe just over the ‘buzzing bridge’ outside Wahiawa proper.
(We never had family out-to-lunch-or-dinner meals there – our go-to place was the Rodby family’s Kemoo Farm farther down the road across from the main gate entry to Schofield Barracks.)
Do you know if your dad ever did business with Sheraton Hawaii hotel properties in the late 1950s an 60s? They were headed by Richard ” Dick” Holtzman who my father had hired from the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulfur Springs in W. Virginia shortly after Sheraton acquired the properties from Matson as I recall. Wonder if they might have known each other as my dad traveled to Hawaii from Boston several times in that period.