In Swinging '60s Waikiki, Almost Hanging With Don Ho

If you were a pretty young girl without a date, the doorman might pick you to bop (yes, we bopped back then) down to the front to the reserved seating. Ho kept several tables right in front for the pretty young girls.

I remember the drinks being free, but I may be wrong about that. Once you got a seat at one of those tables, Ho would signal his approval. His signal was a wink.

I got the wink the first time I showed up. I floated for days. The wink also meant I could become a regular who could show up minutes before the late show and still have a seat. It was, I thought, what royalty must be like.

After the show, the regulars could go to Don Ho's apartment in the Hawaiian Village and hang out with him until the wee hours. The idea of it was exciting, and I had always intended to go. The view of Waikiki, I had heard from friends, was fabulous. But I never made it.

My job at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard started at 7 a.m., and I had not figured out how to nap before hitting the town. The few times my friends and I were invited, I ended up asleep in the car, completely missing all the fun.

Eventually, we tired of the late nights, we got boyfriends, and other young women took our places at the tables down front. But I kept my three mai tai glasses with the Don Ho and the Aliis logo until a few years ago when I gave them to the girlfriend who went to Hawaii with me. She and her husband still live on the Big Island, where they raised two daughters.

The day before I left Hawaii, I drove around Oahu one last time. I stopped at Hanauma Bay, a favorite spot of mine. There in the late-afternoon shadows after everyone else had left, Don Ho walked alone slowly in the surf. He seemed so solemn, so solitary, that I didn't dare speak to him.

I left the next day, off to a career and the demands of a lifetime of work -- its joys and frustrations, its relentless necessity and its sometimes dogged repetition.

Since then, I've often thought about how Don Ho sang "Tiny Bubbles" almost every night. And how he did it with such joy.

Now, when I think about that moment I saw him on the beach, I am glad I left him to his solitude.