Buried treasure: 1930s-era keepsake
by Estee Manfredi | July 17, 2019
Every so often, I get the opportunity to answer interesting historical questions from customers. For instance: How long were we in the ice business? Do we have more information about the early home economists? Did we ever run the Nuuanu hydro station and what happened to it? But a few weeks ago, I received an inquiry unlike any I have ever received.
Oahu resident and metal detector hobbyist Steve Wheeler was knee deep in the water at Diamond Head Beach when his Minelab Equinox 800 metal detector told him something was there. After five minutes of digging, searching against the tide and quickly moving sand, he pulled out a ring.
This is what it looked like:
A careful cleaning revealed an iconic image.
Other than the obvious Hawaiian Electric Company logo on the face of the ring, no other identifying marks had survived. Steve wanted to know if there was any information that we could provide.
The easiest clue was the logo. Since the 1890s, the company has had seven different logos. The emblem on the ring closely resembled our second logo, which was used between 1922 and 1946.
This logo featured the King Kamehameha statue in front of a light bulb and the words, “For Progressive Hawaii We Light The Way.”
But the logo on the ring is a little different.
Since it was a ring given to commemorate years of service, and I knew that annual service award ceremonies were covered in the employee newsletters, I dove into our company newsletter archives. The employee newsletter archive starts in 1937 and luckily, I didn’t have to search too far.
In March 1938, there was a contest for employees to design a new service awards button. The new emblem design needed to be perfectly circular, to have the statue of Kamehameha, and to include: “The Hawaiian Electric Co., Ltd.” The contest guidelines also stated that the new emblem needed to be “a symbol of electric power and light that will combine well with Kamehameha’s statue.”
Twenty designs were submitted, and in April of that year, T. Kufferath, inspector of construction for our Transmission and Distribution Department, was awarded the grand prize of $10.
Here is the winning design:
Four hundred thirty-one service buttons with the new design were distributed on Aug. 17, 1938, at a service award ceremony held at the McKinley High School Auditorium. Each featured the same design, but years of service were distinguished by different background colors. Five-year pins had a black background; 10 years, green; 15 years, blue; 20 years, maroon; 25 years, green with one diamond; 30 years, dark blue with one diamond; 35 years, light blue with two diamonds; and 40 years, purple with two diamonds.
Steve, a retired teacher, says he combs the beaches “almost daily.” Due to the condition of the ring when he found it, he estimated that the ring had been in the ocean for a few decades. He was amazed to find out that the ring he found may have been in the ocean for 80 years!
Interesting finds like this are what initially drew Steve to metal detecting. “You just never know what the heck you are going to pull out of the grounds or the sands of a beach,” he said.
Estee Manfredi is the corporate librarian for Hawaiian Electric Company.
