Hilo Days: Was the Gangster’s Car Real?

A memory imprinted indelibly in my mind is when I paid a dime to see notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone’s car. I wrote about it in my long-gone blog, Hilo Days. But I did keep the post on file. Enjoy!

Al Capone’s Car

At least once a year, the E.K. Fernandez Carnival would come to town for a couple of weeks.

It situated all over the place, but generally near the present Hilo Civic Auditorium, or at St. Joseph's School, about a half-mile away from Obachan's house.

Invariably, it rained. One of Dad's favorite saying was that whenever E.K. Fernandez comes to town, it was going to rain. Come to think of it, I heard that a lot in those days. I believed it too, until I realized that no matter who came to town, it was going to rain. Hilo simply was the rain capital of the world.

One year, Obachan told me that Al Capone's (she pronounced it "Capo-nay's") gangster car was going to be displayed at the carnival. I think it was Walter J. and I who walked to St. Joseph's, and paid our dime to see the historic car.

It was an old '30s sedan, with bullet-proof windows. The man showed us where the bullets had bounced off the windows, leaving little marks.

We gasped at the bullet holes in the fenders. We gasped at the little holes where Al Capone's tommy guns stuck out. We gasped at everything.

The car was probably fake.

Idyllic Song Lyrics

Back in, oh I guess it was 1966, when our little group was putting together a folk-singing trio, I dabbled in a bit of song writing. I didn’t get very far, but I did manage to complete one that we ended up performing at the South Pasadena (CA) Music Festival a couple of years later.

We completed the song to a grand ovation, then launched into our rousing encore number, If I Had a Hammer. Visit my song with me ...

The Beauty of My Land

Waving wheat in fields of gold,

Mighty rivers, truths untold.

On the hillside, look below and see

The beauty of my land.

Oh, come and take my hand,

Come and see her majesty so grand.

Fortunately, I had committed that first verse to memory. There were a few more, a requirement for public performance. Unfortunately, I had typed them out on my portable typewriter and saved in a file folder when the wife and I returned to Hawaii in 1972.

(It’s tragic that we had no personal desktops, laptops, tablets, iPads, or mobile phones with digital storage in those days. They were still many decades away.)

The song turned into “wayward socks,” you know the ones that enter a washing machine and/or dryer, never to be seen again. Despite my recent intensive search in all possible places the lyric sheet might have been hiding, it’s disappeared.

Perhaps someday, I’ll have the energy and inclination to complete the song with new lyrics.