Burl Burlingame

Really a splendid, lovely retirement party for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s Mary Adamski, Helen Altonn and Ben Wood, crowded with co-workers past and present, ranging from Keith Haugen, John Simonds and Leslie Wilcox to the current staff of the merged Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Between the three of them, we’re talking some like 147 combined years of experience. That’s an invaluable memory bank. In other words, they know who the mayor was ten years ago. Journalism isn’t like basketball; your best seasons aren’t your early years. These folks are going out at the top of their game, and it’s Honolulu’s loss.
We appreciate them now. We’re going to miss their expertise later.
The event was at Murphy’s, which has become our home-away-from-home. Entertainment provided by the lovely Mihana Souza, even if she did make me sing with her.

Ian Lind found this video he made of impressions of the extraordinary efforts made to save the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which gave the newspaper an extra decade of life whilst papers across the nation were folding. This is still too close to my heart to comment openly about recent events. But basically, the Star-Bulletin as we knew it is dead. The Honolulu Advertiser is dead as well. What’s left is a completely different product crewed by the survivors, and it should not be compared to what once was. The Star-Advertiser is what we’ve got, so, no whining.

The last time I was in the News Building on Kapiolani Boulevard, the Star-Bulletin staff was being kicked out. At noon, March 14, 2001, the staff of the afternoon daily were no longer welcome. We trooped out and walked down the street to our new digs at Restaurant Row. At the last moment, I grabbed a dolly and stole a Star-Bulletin newsbox. We still have it in the newsroom.
I haven’t set foot in there since. We weren’t just no longer welcome, the Gannett overseers erected barricades and walls around the Honolulu Advertiser newsroom in case someone could accidentally see in. The building, once friendly and open to the public, went on lockdown.
That’s all in the past. Gannett sold out, the Honolulu Advertiser merged with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and the News Building is up for sale. Opened in 1929, designed by the all-star architect team of Emory & Webb, this is a grand structure and deserves its place on the National Register. Alas, auwe, I’m not sure Gannett ever sunk a dime into the infrastructure except to beef up security. A lot of the general office materials are being auctioned off this weekend.
I haven’t been back since we were kicked out, so I stuck my nose in Friday afternoon to see if I recognized anything. In a word, yes. But Gannett had subdivided the access to the building — security! — while opening up the newsroom. It seemed like an amazing amount of space for a newsroom. There were also clues about Gannett’s high-living executives, such as a pile of Italian leather iPad covers, obviously ordered after the newspaper had been sold. For the last decade, the Star-Bulletin wasn’t just the underdog. We were like the undermouse.
But the overwhelming feeling was one of sadness. Competitor or not, this was once a vibrant, busy place, full of knowledge and experience. Hawaii is not just losing a newsroom, it’s losing a room full of good people — people whose professional experience will not likely ever be replaced.

This was a cover concept sketch for the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel “The Moon Maid,” among the best of ERB’s canon. The lighter gravity of the hollow Moon allowed the denizens to neutralize their weight with hydrogen balloons, which in turn allowed them to fly short distances with artificial wings. But a race of centaur-like creatures made venturing into the Moon’s inner wilderness a chancy proposition. At any rate, the book cover proposal didn’t proceed behind this sketch, made for ERB, Inc.

Can you tell these kids are from Los Angeles? Friends Lynn and Nick Krantz are in town and their kids are all growed up. From left, that’s daughter Kate, son Mike and Mike’s girlfriend Lindsay.

For the first time in our lives, we actually chose and ordered new carpeting based on what we wanted, instead of choosing the least objectionable from the remainders rack. Guess what? When you do it that way, it’s way more expensive and you have to wait for a couple of months before it arrives. But arrive it finally did, and thanks to carpet-laying whiz Randy (of Randy’s Carpets, naturally), it’s down. Finally. The above snapshot was taken before we started cluttering the room with furniture. That’s daughter Kate watching TV (“Doctor Who,” naturally) and I didn’t notice at first, but every animal in the house is here checking out the carpet — cats Roo and Lucy, dogs Maizie and Andy. The smaller snapshot shows the edging treatment, with floor tile and decorative tile bordering the room.