The Buzzards in the Halls of
PUNAHOU
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
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From the Punahou School website:
About Punahou
According to legend, an aged Hawaiian couple lived in Manoa and had to travel far for water. They prayed for a spring. In a dream, they were told to uproot the stump of an old hala tree. When they removed the tree stump, they uncovered a spring of clear, sweet water, which they named Ka Punahou (the New Spring).
Today, Punahou School is a coeducational college preparatory day school in Honolulu, Hawai`i. Our 3,750 students, in kindergarten through grade 12, reflect Hawaii's ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic diversity. The legend of Ka Punahou lives on in the Punahou seal, which depicts a hala tree and two taro leaves, and within the school itself, as the community looks to us as a source of educational excellence. Punahou is the largest independent school in the United States.
Currently, Punahou is divided into the Junior School (Kindergarten through grade 8) and the Academy (grades 9 through 12). The breadth and depth of the curriculum is supported by a robust wireless infrastructure and integrated technology tools, three libraries and a wide variety of media services. We also provide a rich and diverse arts program as well as a very successful athletic program that includes a long record of interscholastic athletic accomplishment for both boys and girls....
New facilities were completed in 2005 for grades 6-8 in the Case Middle School at Punahou. This expanded area of campus was designed to support an educational program designed specifically to meet the intellectual and social needs of early adolescents....
Our alumni comprise an important part of Punahou's broad community. Today, our alumni number over 23,000, of whom about 45 percent live in Hawai`i.
Our School colors are buff and blue, representing the sand and the sea of Hawai`i. The school song is "O`ahu Wa."
ROLL CALL
DAVID CAREY - CEO of Outrigger Enterprises.
Outrigger’s top executive is instrumental in the company’s expansion both locally and overseas. From Denver, David Carey moved to Hawaii and initially worked for Outrigger East Hotel, which then had 13 hotels in their system. Now, as president and CEO, David helped in its growth to currently handling 57 hotels, condominiums, and resorts—equivalent to more than 11,000 rooms—in Hawaii, Australia, Guam, New Zealand and the South Pacific.
David Carey is also a huge proponent of education, a key figure in the passing of Act 51—or The Reinventing Education Act of 2004, which allows school principals and teachers to “reinvent” their institutions. David is honored as PBN Business Leader of the Year for 2006 for his outstanding performance in the service lodging and hospitality industry....
BIO:
David Carey is president and chief executive officer of Outrigger Enterprises, Inc., a Honolulu-based company that owns Outrigger Hotels & Resorts and OHANA Hotels & Resorts....
After graduation in 1982, Mr. Carey moved to Honolulu, and was an attorney specializing in corporate and real estate law at Carlsmith Wichman Case Mukai and Ichiki. He handled several hotel and real estate acquisitions, as well as the overall corporate restructuring for Outrigger Hotels, one of the firm’s major clients at that time. Mr. Carey subsequently went to work directly for Outrigger Hotels as executive vice president and general counsel in 1986. He was named president in 1988, and chief executive officer in 1994.
Mr. Carey is a member of numerous business and community organizations, including the Foundation for the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Blood Bank of Hawaii (trustee), Chief Executives Organization, Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Council (chair), Hawaii Hotel & Lodging Association, Hawaii Business Roundtable, Hawaii State Bar Association, Punahou School (trustee), University of Hawaii College of Business, Urban Land Institute and the Young Presidents Organization....
Mr. Carey and his wife, Kathy, have four children. Kathy is an assistant coach for the University of Hawaii’s women’s soccer team.
Supporting the Military, David has also helped to ensure a strong military presence in Hawaii. He has had a long history of supporting both the senior flag officers and enlisted personnel that temporarily call Hawaii their home. As the Chair of the Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Council, he has led the MAC delegation to Washington D.C., and has worked with senior military leadership here in Hawaii. He has also made certain Outrigger continues to make military personnel and their families feel welcome – and appreciated – in Hawaii.....
http://odeo.com/audio/1711539/play
Daniel H. Case, Senior Director of the prominent Honolulu law firm of Case Lombardi and Pettit, is the father of AOL’s Steve Case, and AON’s Jeffrey Case, and is an associate of P&C Insurance Company president, James Cribley.
Daniel H. Case was born in Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii on February 25, 1925. Educated at Punahou School, he served as a Lieutenant (j.g.) in the USNR from 1944-1947 and then went on to Williams College and the University of Denver, receiving his law degree in 1952. He is an affiliate of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, and a member of the American and Hawaii State Bar Associations. In 1978, he served as President of the Hawaii State Bar Association.
His areas of concentration are corporate and trust law for major firms based or doing business in the State of Hawaii.
Steve Case (born August 21, 1958) is a businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). He reached his highest profile when he played an instrumental role in AOL's merger with Time Warner in 2000.
Steve Case grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, showing an early entrepreneurial bent. He graduated from the prestigious Punahou School (Class of 1976) and attended Central Union Church. His first significant innovations were with Froggies Used Books and Records in Waikiki, where he developed and applied innovative marketing techniques to greatly grow the company sales.
He graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1980 with a degree in political science, and began working as a marketer at Procter & Gamble soon after. In 1983 he became a marketing consultant at Control Video, a small company that distributed games for the Atari 2600 game console using a phone line and modem.
In 1983 Control Video nearly went bankrupt, and investor Frank Caufield had a friend of his, Jim Kimsey, brought in as a manufacturing consultant. Kimsey hired Case as a part-time consultant, and he later joined the company as a full-time marketing employee. In 1985 Kimsey became CEO of the newly renamed Quantum Computer Services and promoted Case to vice president of marketing, and in 1987 promoted him again to executive vice president. Kimsey groomed Case to become chairman and CEO when Kimsey retired, and the transition formally took place in 1991 (CEO) and 1995 (chairman).
As part of the changes that gave birth to Quantum, Case changed the company's strategy, creating an online service called Quantum Link (Q-Link for short) for the Commodore 64 in 1985 with programmer (and AOL co-founder) Marc Seriff. In 1988, Quantum began offering the AppleLink online service for Apple and PC-Link for IBM compatible computers. In 1991 he changed the company name to America Online and merged the Apple and PC services under the AOL name; the new service reached 1 million subscribers by 1994, and Q-Link was terminated October 31 of that year....
After a decade of quick growth, AOL merged with media giant Time Warner. The $106 billion merger was completed in January 2001 but quickly ran into trouble as part of the dot-com recession, compounded by accounting scandals. Case announced his resignation as chairman in January 2003, although remained on the company's board of directors for almost three more years.
The failure of the AOL-Time Warner merger is the subject of a book by Nina Munk entitled Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner (2005). A photo of Case and Time Warner's Jerry Levin embracing at the announcement of the merger appears on the cover.
During 2005 in The Washington Post, Case wrote, "It's now my view that it would be best to 'undo' the merger by splitting Time Warner into several independent companies and allowing AOL to set off on its own path."
Case resigned from the Time-Warner board of directors in October 2005, to spend more time working on Revolution LLC, a holding company he founded in April 2005. He remains (as of December 2005) one of Time-Warner's largest individual shareholders. He is also chairman of the Case Foundation, which he and his wife Jean Case created in 1997.
INVESTMENTS
Revolution holds majority stakes in several healthcare (Revolution Healthcare Group), and resort firms. In August 2005 purchased a controlling interest in Flexcar.
Case owns nearly half of Hawaii-based Maui Land and Pineapple Co. He also controls tens of thousands of acres of land in Hawaii.
Case is the cousin of Hawaii congressman Ed Case. His late brother Daniel Case was an investment banker noted for both his great skill and high ethics. His father was the founding partner of one of Hawaii's pre-eminent law firms.
CASE MIDDLE SCHOOL
Before plans were made for a new middle school complex, America Online founder and Punahou School graduate of 1976 Steve Case donated ten million dollars. This led to construction of a new middle school for grades six through eight. The Case Middle School was actually named in honor of Steve Case's parents.
The middle school was designed and built by John Hara Associates Inc. Some time into the project, the school learned about Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The school then hired a design consultant, John Hara ('57) for sustainability and found out that they could earn the LEED Gold certification....
The middle school also won the Energy Project of the Year award in the Seventh Energy Efficiency Awards, sponsored by Hawaiian Electric Company...
The whole school cost more than $50 million USD and was made possible solely through donations....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punahou_School
Sanford Ballard Dole (April 23, 1844 – June 9, 1926) was a politician and jurist of Hawai’i as a kingdom, protectorate, republic and territory.
EARLY YEARS
Dole was born in Honolulu to a family of white Protestant Christian missionaries from Norridgewock, Maine in the United States. His cousin was the pineapple magnate James Dole who followed the elder Dole to Hawaii in later years. Dole was part of a wealthy, elite immigrant community in the Hawaiian Islands that established a dominant presence in the local political climate. Serving as a successful attorney and friend of King David Kalaakaua and Queen Liliuokalani, Dole pursued and advocated the westernization of Hawaiian society and culture.
BAYONET CONSTITUTION
Dole participated in a revolution in 1887 in which local businessmen, sugar planters and politicians backed by the Honolulu Rifles forced adoption of the 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii written by Interior Minister Lorrin A. Thurston. It stripped voting rights from all Asians outright, and disenfranchised poor Native Hawaiians, Americans and Europeans due to income and wealth requirements, effectively consolidating power with the elite Native Hawaiian, European and American subjects of the kingdom. In addition, it minimized the power of the monarch in favor of more influential governance by the Privy Council, the royal cabinet. Kalakaua later appointed Dole a justice of the Kingdom of Hawaii Supreme Court.
The monarchy ended in January 1893 after a coup d'etat organized by many of the same actors involved in the 1887 revolt. The U.S. Minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens, returning on the U.S.S. Boston while these events were in progress, requested the landing of U.S. Marines and bluejackets in Honolulu the day before the Provisional Government was declared, "for the purpose of protecting our legation, consulate, and the lives and property of American citizens, and to assist in preserving public order."
Historian Russ Kuykdendall states, "the troops did not cooperate with the committee, and the committee had no more knowledge than did the Queen's Government where the troops were going nor what they were going to do."
The Provisional Government that was formed after the coup was led by President Dole, and was recognized within 48 hours by all nations with diplomatic ties to the Kingdom of Hawaii as the legitimate government of the islands. With Grover Cleveland's election as President of the United States, the Provisional Government's hopes of annexation were derailed for a time. Indeed, Cleveland tried to directly help reinstate the monarchy, after an investigation led by James Henderson Blount.
The Blount Report of July 17, 1893, commissioned by President Cleveland, concluded that the Committee of Safety conspired with U.S. ambassador John L. Stevens to land the United States Marine Corps, to forcibly remove Queen Liliuokalani from power, and declare a Provisional Government of Hawaii consisting of members from the Committee of Safety.
On November 16, 1893, Albert Willis presented the Queen with Cleveland's request that she grant amnesty to the Revolutionists in return for reinstatement. Initially, the Queen refused, demanding capital punishment for those involved.
On December 18, 1893, the queen changed her mind with regards to the punishment of Dole and Thurston. On December 23, 1893, unaware that Cleveland had referred the matter to Congress on December 18, 1893, Willis presented the Provisional Government with Cleveland's demand to restore the queen to the throne — the Provisional Government refused.
The Morgan Report of February 26, 1894, concluded that the overthrow was locally based, motivated by a history of corruption of the monarchy, and that American troops only served to protect American property and citizens and had no role in the end of the Hawaiian Monarchy.
The Provisional Government held a constitutional convention and on July 4, 1894, established the Republic of Hawaii.
After an unsuccessful attempt at armed rebellion on January 6, 1895, the Queen abdicated and swore allegiance to the Republic of Hawaii on January 24, 1895. While under arrest, she wrote, "I hereby do fully and unequivocally admit and declare that the Government of the Republic of Hawaii is the only lawful Government of the Hawaiian Islands, and that the late Hawaiian monarchy is finally and forever ended, and no longer of any legal or actual validity, force or effect whatsoever.
PRESIDENT OF A REPUBLIC
Lorrin A. Thurston declined the presidency and Dole was chosen to lead the government instead; Dole would serve as the first and only president from 1894 to 1900. Dole in turn appointed Thurston to lead a lobbying effort in Washington, DC and secure Hawaii's annexation.
Dole's government weathered several attempts to restore the monarchy, including an attempted armed rebellion in which Robert William Wilcox participated; Wilcox and the other conspirators had their sentences reduced or commuted by Dole after being sentenced to death. Dole was successful as a diplomat - every nation that recognized the Kingdom of Hawaii also recognized the Republic of Hawaii.
GOVERNOR AND JUDGE
President William McKinley appointed Dole to become the first territorial governor after U.S. annexation of Hawaii had been procured. Dole assumed the office in 1900 but resigned in 1903 to accept an appointment as U.S. District Court judge. He served in the latter post until 1915 and died after a series of strokes in 1926. His ashes are interred in the cemetery of Kawaiaha’o Church. Dole Middle School which is located in Kalihi Valley on the island of Oahu was named after him in 1956.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Dole
Wendy Lee Gramm (born 1945) is chairman of the Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based in Washington D.C. She is also the wife of former United States Senator Phil Gramm.
Wendy Lee Gramm was born in Hawaii and is of Korean and Hawaiian ancestry. She received a B.A. degree in economics from Wellesley College in 1966 and a Ph. D. in economics from Northwestern University in 1971.
In her role at the Mercatus Center, Gramm generally calls for deregulation of the energy industry.
Previously, Gramm held several positions in the Reagan Administration, including heading the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1988 to 1993. After a heavy lobbying campaign from Enron, the CFTC exempted it from regulation in trading of energy derivatives.
This regulatory loophole may also have allowed for the failure of the hedge fund Amaranth Advisors in September 2006. While on the board of directors she received donations from Enron to support the Mercatus Center.
After the implosion of Enron, Gramm and the other directors where named in several investor lawsuits, many of which have been settled for large sums. In particular, Gramm and other Enron directors agreed to an $168 million dollar settlement in a suit led by the University of California. As part of that settlement, she and 9 other director agreed to collectively pay $13 million to settle claims of insider trading. The remainder of the settlement was to be paid by insurance.
From 1985 to 1988, Gramm was head of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). In 2002, OIRA solicited public recommendations for regulatory reform. Mercatus made 44 recommendations.
Gramm also serves as chair of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a director of the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative women's group. She has sat on the boards of Enron Corporation, Iowa Beef Processors, Invesco Funds, Longitude, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and State Farm Insurance Companies.
She has two sons: Jeff, who heads the indie-rock outfit Aden, and Marshall, who is a professor of economics at Rhodes College.
Ronald Reagan called her "My favorite economist."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Lee_Gramm
Fred Hemmings is a Republican member of the Hawaii Senate, representing the 25th District since 2000. Previously he was a member of the Hawaii House of Representatives from 1984 through 1990.
He is also a surfer, and author. He is a 1965 graduate of Punahou School. As 1968 world surfing champion, Hemmings is considered one of the most successful surfers of all time. After a career of professional surfing in the 1960s and 1970s, Hemmings entered politics. In 1991, Hemmings was inducted into the International Surfing Hall of Fame, and in 1998 the Hawaii State Sports Hall of Fame.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hemmings
CHRISTOPHER RYAN HENRY
Christopher Ryan Henry (Annapolis) — VP of Science Applications International Corporation and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for George W. Bush.
Robert G. Klein (Stanford) — Hawaii Supreme Court Judge appointed Federal Judge by William Clinton (withdrawn).
Arnold Morgado, Jr. (UH) — Kansas City Chiefs running back 1977-80 (52 games); College classmate of James B. Nicholson; City councilman.
Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. He is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history, and the only African American currently serving in the U.S. Senate.
Born to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in culturally diverse surroundings. He lived for most of his childhood in the majority-minority U.S. state of Hawaii and spent four of his pre-teen years in the multi-ethnic Indonesian capital city of Jakarta. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, university lecturer, and civil rights lawyer before running for public office. He served in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, launching his campaign for U.S. Senate in 2003.
Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention while still an Illinois state legislator. He went on to win election to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with a landslide 70% of the vote in an election year marked by Republican gains. As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, Obama co-sponsored the enactment of conventional weapons control and transparency legislation, and made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the 110th Congress, he has sponsored legislation on lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, and care for returned U.S. military personnel.
He is among the Democratic Party's leading candidates for nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Since announcing his candidacy in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War and implementing universal health care as campaign themes.
Obama married in 1992 and has two daughters. He has authored two bestselling books: a memoir of his youth titled Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, a personal commentary on U.S. politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ObamaBarack.jpg
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March 25, 2007
The not-so-simple story
of Barack Obama's youth
Shaped by different worlds,
an outsider found ways to fit in
By Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker, Chicago Tribune
HONOLULU - The life stories, when the presidential candidate tells them, have a common theme: the quest to belong.
A boy wants to find his place in a family where he is visibly different: chubby where others are thin, dark where others are light.
A youth living in a distant land searches and finds new friends, a new
language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an
American magazine.
A young black man struggles for acceptance at an institution of privilege, where he
finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around him that he
turns to alcohol and drugs.
These have been the stories told about the first two character-shaping decades
of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's life, a story line largely shaped by his own best-selling
memoir, political speeches and interviews.
But the reality of Obama's narrative is not that simple.
More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and
neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review
of public records, show the arc of Obama's personal journey took him to
places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.
At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. Some seem to make Obama look better in the retelling, others appear to exaggerate his outward struggles over issues of race, or simply skim over some of the most painful, private moments of his life.
The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama.
Hawaii had become a state only two years before Obama's birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it. The U.S. military was expanding on the island of Oahu, home to the new capital of Honolulu. And a young, iconoclastic white woman who had defied the social mores of the day by marrying a dashing black man from Kenya was coping with the fact that her new husband essentially had abandoned her and their young child in 1963 to study at Harvard....
In the six weeks since Obama announced his intention to run for the White House, he routinely has suggested that his diverse background--raised for a time in the Third World, schooled at elite institutions and active in urban politics--makes him the best-suited candidate to speak to rich and poor, black and white, mainstream voters and those utterly disenchanted with the political system.
Not as well known is the fact that the many people who raised him were nearly as diverse as the places where he grew up. There was his mother, Ann, a brilliant but impulsive woman; his grandmother Madelyn, a deeply private and stoically pragmatic Midwesterner; his grandfather Stanley, a loving soul inclined toward tall tales and unrealistic dreams....
During her son's earliest years, Obama's mother, whose full name was Stanley Ann Dunham because her father desperately had wished for a boy, attended college at the University of Hawaii. Known as Ann throughout her adult life, she kept to herself. She became estranged from her husband, Barack Obama Sr., after his departure for Harvard and rarely saw the group of friends that they had made at the University of Hawaii.
One of those friends, Neil Abercrombie, then a graduate student in the sociology department, frequently would see young Obama around town with his grandfather Stanley, whom Obama called "Gramps."...
"Stanley loved that little boy," said Abercrombie, now a Democratic congressman from Hawaii. "In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous."...
Madelyn Dunham, a rising executive at the Bank of Hawaii during Obama's Punahou days, was more reserved but seemed to love having her grandson's friends over to play and hang out....
Ann and the boy lived with the Dunhams in Honolulu until Obama was 6. Then his young mother, now divorced, met and married an Indonesian student studying at the University of Hawaii....
Memories of a racial awakening?
Obama has told the story--one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness--time and again, in remarkable detail.
He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an "ambush attack."
The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.
"I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation," Obama wrote of the magazine photos in "Dreams."
Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, "It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?" (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)
In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin....
TERRANCE O’DONNELL
Terrence O'Donnell (Air Force Academy) — Deputy Special Assistant to Richard Nixon and Special Assistant to Gerald Ford, General Counsel, Department of Defense, Executive VP of Textron.
ROBERT STEPHEN SILBERMAN
Robert Stephen Silberman (Dartmouth) — Assistant Secretary of the Army for George W. Bush, President of CalEnergy and Strayer Education.
ROLL CALL TO BE CONTINUED...
Meanwhile, back in The Catbird Seat, you can check out more birds that eat your tax dollars in the following nests...
APCOA: BIRDS IN THE PARKING LOT
CONFESSIONS OF A WHISTLEBLOWER
DIRTY MONEY, DIRTY POLITICS & BISHOP ESTATE
THE GRAND (AND DIRTY) KO OLINA
OFFICE OF THE U.S. TRUSTEE VS. HARMON
PRUDENTIAL: A NEST ON SHAKY GROUND
THE VULTURES IN MAUNAWILI VALLEY
VAMPIRES IN THE U.S. DEPT OF TRANSPORTATION
VULTURES OF THE SANDWICH ISLES
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Originally posted: December 9, 2007
Last Update June 4, 2008, by The Catbird
