"WORKING WITH FIRE" AT THE PCC"

I spent the majority of my years working intermittently at the Polynesian Cultural Center since 1968 in marketing media and communications; however, I’d like to share three experiences below in which I was involved where FIRE played a key role. Few know anything about two of them, as follows: 

The night we might have burned down a PCC gift shop: In the middle of one night in about 1993, after I had gone to work full-time as general manager for Host-Marriott, which ran the Polynesian Cultural Center gift shops under a concession contract for several years in those days, I got a call at home from the Hauula Fire Department crew captain. He told me smoke was coming out the top of a sliding door to one of the former shops in what is now the Hukilau Marketplace (next to the Pacific Theater). 

 I knew immediately what had happened: We had set up a hot, bright work light on a 12-inch beam above one of the shops to provide extra illumination, and when I left early that night (about 9:30 p.m.), gave instructions to the closing supervisor on duty to make sure it got turned off before locking up — which she apparently forgot to do.

HFD Captain Larry Nihipali, whose ʻohana lives in the Hauula/Laie area and has connections to the Center, called me, saying they had responded to an alarm and asked if I could immediately bring a key before they had to break down a door. 

I quickly hopped out of bed, put on my clothes, drove the few minutes to the shop, and unlocked the door for the HDF team, noticing thick smoke was coming from where the extra light still glowed inside.

The HFD team went into action, turned off the light, set up a ladder, and sprayed the now-smoking embers on top of the beam where we had placed the light. Fortunately, the beam was only smoldering but had not burst into flames, and HFD’s finest helped me set up several large exhaust fans to clear the smoke. 

I left after about an hour, grateful I didnʻt have to tell my boss (in Honolulu) or PCC President Lester Moore we had been responsible for burning down the gift shop that night. By the next open shift, we stopped using that light, and nobody could tell we had averted a disaster.

A “flaming shower” of bamboo torches: However, in my first job at the Center in 1968, I discovered there WERE a couple of other things that could also pose fire hazards:

 Today, we have strict fire safety equipment, designated areas, standards, and procedures backstage, but when I was the student stage manager in the late 1960s, things were much less strict; we used open buckets of kerosene for the many lighted bamboo torches that were part of the show, plus the boxy fire-walking devices and Samoan fire knives (that still appear in PCC night shows). 

For example, during the finale of our This is Polynesia night show back then, most cast members came on stage carrying about a two-foot length of one-inch-diameter green bamboo torch. As the closing song reached its final strains, as many as 50 cast members in the front row tossed their flaming torches in a looping arc into the small section of the lagoon that surrounded the stage. The stage lights would go-black for the briefest moment as our water-spray curtain kicked high, and the audience frequently gave standing ovations. 

FYI, every night after the show and into the next day, stage crew members fetched most of those torches from the lagoon — which was about two feet deep — but some invariably drifted into an open drainage canal that used to run alongside the back path from Church College of Hawaii, through a conduit under Kamehameha Hwy., and into the ocean; thus, a few torches were lost every night and had to be replaced. 

The stage crew also emptied any water that might have gotten into these bamboo tubes and set them aside to dry for the next day’s performance. Every day, we also needed to replace some of the two-to-three-inch-long “wicks,” which would occasionally come out. For this, we cut replacements from large sheets of absorbent material made from what was then called bagasse, a cane byproduct after the sugary “juices” had been squeezed out of the stalks. The mill processed the stalks into bagasse up and compressed it into “poor manʻs” fibreboard sheets similar to plywood, but not nearly as sturdy, even though it was often used as a building material in those days. 

We called it “kay-nack” — which I only more recently realized was pidgin-English for the fibreboard’s actual tradename, Canenec™. I remember it was very dusty and messy to cut, somewhat like burst “cat-tail” pods.  

Early the next night, the stage crew would soak the wick ends of the mini-torches in the buckets of kerosene, which we would once again light when the cast members funneled onto the stage for the finale.

I remember once in a while a little burning kerosene might run down the bamboo torch, much to everyone’s surprise (but a quick wipe with a damp lavalava we always had standing-by easily took care of that problem, and I don’t recall any reported injuries). 

Firewalker “boxes” and fire-knives: By the way, the stage crew in those days also used larger strips of “kaynack” to absorb the kerosene placed on three sides of the firewalker boxes. The “kaynack” would char on top over time and eventually had to be replaced, but the flames never got below the top edge. 

From the audience’s perspective, however, the flames also kept them from seeing there was a small wooden platform taking up most of the box’s surface. 

 Some of the knife dancers also used kaynack on the upper blade parts of their knives but wrapped strips of asbestos around the bottom. These were days before we realized asbestos could be toxic, but the pieces of kaynack had a bad habit of breaking off in mid-performance and flying everywhere, so most dancers over the years switched to using absorbent cotton towels wired onto both ends of the knives.  

Disposing of an old night show pyrotechnic device: And finally, I conclude not with a fire story, but one that’s definitely related — a bit of a confession, actually. 

The PCC stage crew in those days had a small equipment room inside the “mountain backdrop” that’s still a dominant feature of the Hale Aloha. [I know for sure there’s now an instruction room in the upper level, but I have never been back inside the bottom level of the “mountain,” which also included the hand-cranked valve we used to turn the “water curtain” on and off, as cued by the technical director.”] 

 A strange-looking “cone” and roll of fuse: The room contained a box of what looked like fireworks that had probably been there since the Center opened in 1963. As you might imagine, we were all a little fascinated by the box — especially a big “cone” firework with no place to light it and an accompanying roll of what looked like thick fuse that could possibly be rigged to the cone. 

Although I’ve never been able to verify this — and Iʻve asked the very first PCC stage manager, who didn’t remember anything like that — we all thought the cone might have been used at some point to create an early “volcano” effect. In any case, you can probably already see where this story is going. 

Every night after the show, the cast took off quickly, followed by the wardrobe “mothers” (who came back early the next day to do laundry and ironing), while ushers and the custodial crew cleaned the theater, and the stage crew did as much as possible to set everything up for the next night’s performance. 

Well, one night with just a couple of us left behind in the theater, we placed the cone in the center of the sand-covered stage, guessed that about a 10-foot length of fuse would be long enough, and shoved it into what looked like a possible spot on the cone.

At first, the fuse didnʻt respond to the lighter, but we persisted — and SURPRISE! Suddenly, about as quickly as a finger snap, the fuse seemed to zip its “now-way-too-short” length into the edge of the cone. In retrospect, the fuse might have been some kind of what the military and construction people call “det-cord” (i.e., “detonating cord”), which is used to set off other explosives almost instantaneously and can be dangerous in itself.  

For example, each of us seeing that cord ignite barely had time to turn our backs to the cone before a tremendous BOOM sent a mini-mushroom cloud of smoke billowing up from the center of the stage. The explosion was as loud, if not louder than, anything people hear nowadays with aerial fireworks and bombs in Laie that sometimes [illegally] mark holidays and funerals. 

To say we were surprised was to understate our shock. The back of our clothes and hair had been pelted with sand, and it seemed like only seconds later, a PCC security guard came running into the theater to see what had happened.

I still think the “cone” was some kind of volcano effect (because I once saw something similar in a Fern Grotto show on Kauai), but perhaps damp conditions inside the PCC “volcano” had degraded or clumped the gunpowder together, it “flashed” all at once instead of shooting out sparks as we had expected. 

Fortunately, none of us were hurt; there were only a few silent witnesses, although others must have wondered what caused the noise. I vaguely recall we told the security guard we were trying to dispose of old pyrotechnical props and were equally surprised the incident turned out so explosively; but thatʻs the end of the tale, and once again, I was glad I did NOT blow up the Hale Aloha — or ourselves — over 55 years ago.