Last week, I took issue with the popular argument that tourism does nothing but “extract” from and “exploit” Hawai‘i. It’s not hard to find another common complaint, that tourism spending just leaves the Islands, an argument people make to suggest that the tourists aren’t worth the bother.
Reality is more complicated than clichés, however. The money does not all leave the Islands and tourism can launch careers in unexpected ways. Thanks to a visit I made to a popular attraction earlier this month, I’ve been thinking about how this has been true for me, personally.
My first job was in tourism. I didn’t think of it that way when I started working at the USS Bowfin back in 1984. In my mind, I was working at a historic ship museum, one I was personally interested in since my dad had served in the Navy during WWII and then aboard diesel submarines like the Bowfin in the ’50s. The submarine was cool, the history was cool and having my own spending money while still in high school was … the coolest. I’d cash those checks and proceed directly to Tower Records on Ke‘eaumoku.
The tourists were there all along, paying for my Elvis Costello albums. And paying for bigger things, as well. I worked there through summers in high school and college and was lucky to be around when the nonprofit that runs the Bowfin, Pacific Fleet Submarine Memorial Assoc., as it was called then, got the funding together to build a real memorial park, with a museum and permanent gift shop. That all opened in September 1988.
I was part of a small group that transported all the artifacts by truck from a Quonset hut at the Pearl Harbor submarine base, cleaned them up and made the first exhibits. Exhibits that, to my surprise, remained on display for the next 30 years.
In 2021, the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum, as the group is now known, unveiled a $20-million museum renovation. Top to bottom, front to back, a total re-do featuring state of the art modern museum exhibits, telling the story of Navy submarines — past, present and future — better than ever. It was so good when I toured it that I didn’t mind at all that it replaced what I worked on when I was just a college kid.
Amazingly, this month, the museum just debuted another $4-million upgrade, specifically to its Cold War section. The storytelling is better and includes new interactive exhibits using control panels that come from the exact same class of submarines in service today. It’s a terrific capstone as the organization celebrates its 45th anniversary.
Four million dollars, so soon after spending $20 million? How?
As Executive Director Andrew “Homer” Ring said at the blessing, the Bowfin is “the world’s most visited submarine museum.” It gets more than 350,000 visitors a year and will receive its 12 millionth visitor at some point in 2027.
That’s a lot of admission revenue. Without tourists, all those artifacts might still be on base, out of public view. Without tourists, the Bowfin herself might have been scrapped.
It’s happened elsewhere. Two WWII submarines that had been preserved as museum ships have been lost. The USS Ling had been on display at the New Jersey Naval Museum from the 1970s until Hurricane Sandy damaged the boat and the facility in 2012. The museum closed and the Ling is apparently stuck in the mud of the Hackensack River, abandoned and rusting away. In South Carolina, USS Clamagore went on display in 1981, the same time as the Bowfin, but that boat’s non-profit could not afford its upkeep and she was scrapped in 2022.
Others thrive, such as the USS Pampanito, located at San Francisco’s busy Fisherman’s Wharf, an area that gets some 14 million visitors a year. Foot traffic matters if you want an attraction to endure.
I could not guess how people have found employment at the Bowfin over the decades, on the boat or in the gift shop, in the office or as museum curators. I could not guess how many thousands of kids from local schools have visited on field trips, or how many kama‘āina were among those visitors.
For me, I know that my Bowfin time led to a job next door at the USS Arizona Memorial, at an amazing time when the memorial was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. That job included an opportunity to contribute to a history book on the Women’s Air Raid Defense service in Hawai‘i, so that I was a published author before I even graduated from UH. That certainly made it easier for me to write professionally at Honolulu Magazine, then Pacific Business News and now Aloha State Daily.
I haven’t worked at a historic site bolstered by tourism since 1992. But in a way, tourism made my whole career possible. The same may true for countless kama‘āina.
Congratulations to the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum on the new exhibits and on 45 years of preserving history. And thank you for setting a great example of how to reinvest those tourism dollars locally, proving that some of the money does indeed stay right here in the Islands, powering good things.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
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