Hawaii: Patriarch to a State

Walter Francis Dillingham was proud of being a karnaaina (oldtimer) and he loved Hawaii’s traditions. He seldom appeared without an orchid in his lapel, and he was pleased that the women of his family learned to do the hula. Yet, for all his fondness for the old ways, Dillingham probably did more to mold a modern Hawaii than any other man. And when he died last week at 88, the islands mourned the loss of “Uncle Walter,” who in a sense had been patriarch to a whole state.

The first Dillingham in the islands was Walter’s father—Benjamin Franklin Dillingham, first officer on a clipper ship out of San Francisco. In Honolulu on shore leave in 1865, he fell off a horse, broke his leg, and settled down for life. Benjamin bought a hardware store, married a missionary’s daughter, had four children. In 1888 the ambitious ex-sailor got a royal franchise from King Kalakaua to build a narrow-gauge railroad to haul sugar cane from inland Oahu down to the sea. Skeptics called it “Dillingham’s Folly.” But it was a huge success, became a key first step in the Dillingham family’s development of the islands.

On a Shoestring. A decade later, Benjamin tried another railroad on the big island of Hawaii. This one was indeed a folly, wound up putting the Dillinghams $4,000,000 in debt—a bigger deficit than the entire Territory of Hawaii had at the time. Walter was called home from Harvard in 1900 to help straighten out the mess, and when Benjamin’s health failed, he took over the business.

Creditors hounded him so much, Walter recalled, that he used to hide under desks to avoid them, took to meeting the trains himself so he could “collect fares to pay a few creditors the next day.” But as he fought to pull the family out of debt, Walter had his own ideas. In 1902 he borrowed $5,000 to start the Hawaiian Dredging Co.—something he himself considered “strictly a shoestring venture.”

The new company dredged the opening channel through the reefs of Pearl Harbor in 1902, eventually deepened it enough to change Pearl from a little coaling station to one of the world’s great harbors. Walter Dillingham used the muck dragged up from the sea to fill in low, marshy areas around Honolulu, over the years created 5,000 acres of solid ground that now holds a full third of the city’s population, is valued at upwards of $280 million. Most valuable of all is a section that before 1925 was nothing but a narrow sand crescent, covered with foul-smelling flotsam and surrounded by 1,000 acres of swamp. Dillingham’s men slashed a two-mile canal through the marshes, and drained the area. It is now called Waikiki Beach.

Dillingham’s enterprises grew to be worth at least $150 million, and the family’s influence in Hawaii was unsurpassed. During World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt wanted to know about the situation in Hawaii, he phoned Walter Dillingham. When President Eisenhower visited the islands, he stepped off his plane, looked about and immediately asked, “Where’s Walter?”

A Heritage for Hawaii. Although he was a fervent Republican, Walter Dillingham never entered politics actively. He fought against statehood, arguing that the islands would come under the control of labor-union Communists if tight territorial controls were lifted. But when Hawaii became a state, he supported the change wholeheartedly. His son Ben ran for the U.S. Senate last year against Democrat Daniel Inouye and lost.

Always a vigorous man, Walter Dillingham played polo until he was 65, was at one time an officer or director of some 20 different corporations. When he died last week, he left a flourishing Dillingham dynasty (his wife, two sons, a daughter, ten grandchildren and one great-grandchild) and a booming Dillingham business empire. He also left a powerful family heritage for Hawaii, handed down from the days of old Benjamin Dillingham. “From my father,” Walter Dillingham once said, “I inherited the moving vision that saw these islands prosper.”