Elvis Presley, the 1960s king of rock and roll, deserves some recognition for helping the Polynesian Cultural Center’s focus on canoes in its earliest years. 

First, for example, in 1961 — about the time labor missionaries started to build the PCC — Elvis brought out Blue Hawaii, a very popular movie co-starring Joan Blackham, who played the part of a local beauty from Kaua’i.  

As their romance develops toward the end of the film, the couple appear on decorated canoe floating down a waterway at what was then the CocoPalms Resort near Kapa‘a, Kaua‘i. (The Coco Palms was destroyed in 1992 during Hurricane ‘Iniki.) 

That scene set the “gold standard for let’s get engaged on a Polynesian canoe.” For example, I remember when Japanese national TV brought Sāmoan sumotori Konishiki (Saleva‘a Atisinoe from Wai‘anae) and his bride to the Center in the 1980s to videotape them on a wedding party-canoe. 

We’ll come back to this theme in a moment, but second, Presley returned to Hawaii in 1965 to film part of his third island-based movie, Paradise Hawaiian Style, which came out the following year. According to PCC old-timers who were there and appeared in background shots, “the king” spent about a month using the PCC and student employees, who were singing and dancing, serenading them, as he and his movie-girlfriend cruised past each village along our lagoon. 

At the end of the PCC segment, all the villagers rush Elvis through the tunnel to the stage at Hale Aloha (now the luau) theater where he is suddenly the featured entertainer, surrounded by the entire night show cast (but performing during the daytime). He sings Bula Laie (but in English as Drums of the Islands). 

It’s hard to measure exactly how much impact Presley’s publicity generated, but old-timers say attendance started improving about that time.Interestingly enough, as PCC popularity grew, so too did demand among people who wanted to get engaged or celebrate their weddings aboard one of our canoes. 

The earliest PCC wedding party canoe? On April 27, 1968, the author believes he was involved in the very first wedding party canoe of TufiMagalei and Luse Tapusoa, Samoans who had partially grown up in Laie. He graduated from Kahuku High (1964), and she attended high school in Honolulu before moving to California to stay with her older sister (the late Oliana Tautū). Luse’s father, Mauga Tapusoa, was our Sāmoan Village ”chief,” her mother Fa’ane’e Tufaga Tapusoa was a weaver, and by the time the young couple got married, she was the operations manager’s (Uncle T. David Hannemann) secretary. 

Magalei was Foley’s last companion in the Samoa Mission when he returned home in September 1967 (while Magalei had just one more soa before finishing his mission). All returning missionaries from the South Pacific in those days knew they could get complementary tickets to the PCC, if they contacted the operations manager’s secretary when they arrived on the grounds. That was the first time he met Luse Tapusoa. 

After spending a few months with his family in Salt Lake City, Foley returned to Laie as a permanent resident and renewed his friendship with Tufi, who had also come home by then. “When Tufi and Luse got married in 1968, I was his uō sili (“best man”), while Erena Mapuhi was her maid of honor,” he said. 

Danny Morse, an old kama’aina who had been a community photographer for decades, took the wedding party canoe picture. Those on the canoe (starting from the front row, clockwise) include Luse Tapusoa Magalei, Tufi Magalei, Afa (Arthur) Hannemann, T. David Hannemann, Mike (Mikaele) Foley, Eugene Crismon (center), Rene Teriipaia, ____, ____, musicians Aunty Tino Koahou and Uncle Keone Ah Quin, bridesmaids Wendy Pitcher and Earlene Durrant, and Erena Mapuhi. 

Tufi passed away in 2005, and Luse in 2022. He previously worked in the PCC sales and marketing department before taking a job with the airlines in Texas, and finally as a corrections officer for OCCC. Over the years, Luse taught school at Laie Elementary and worked in various PCC departments. She was also a member of “The Mamas” Samoan singing group. 

Quite a few of their descendants and relatives have also worked at the PCC since those early days. Wedding-party canoe tours were discontinuedbefore the COVID-19 hiatus; and today, only “outtake” missionaries from the Hawaii Honolulu and Hawaii Laie Missions get complimentary PCC tickets during the week before they return home.