Kauai as it was in the 1940s and '50s

Book excerpt: Kauai As It Was In The 1940s and '50s is a lively first-hand account of life on Kauai as it was lived in the radio days of the 1940s and 1950s. Author Mike Ashman, a popular radio announcer for KTOH, Kauai's first commercial radio station, takes readers back to the days when sugar plantations were the center of island life, and Honolulu was a far, faraway place. Ashman's cast of characters include "Mr. Kauai," Charlie Fern, the long-time editor of The Garden Island newspaper, the local musicians he shared a bandstand with, the famous, and the infamous. Ashman captures the pathos of Kauai's tight-knit community in the uncertain days prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the era when the island emerged from its rural isolation in the heady post-war years of the late 1940s and early 1950s.