“A Couple of Dreamers”: Audacious Beginnings for Hawaii Business Magazine
Ethel and Joe Murphy came to Hawai‘i in 1952 so Joe could sell vacuum cleaners. By 1955, they founded the first and oldest regional business magazine in the country.
This article, originally published in the March 2015 issue, has been updated with further information and to reflect current timelines.
It was 1955. The FDA approved the Salk polio vaccine and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. The Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series for the first time and Disneyland opened. James Stewart and Grace Kelly were Hollywood’s biggest stars.
That was 70 years ago. In Hawai‘i, a military plane crashed in the Wai‘anae Mountains, killing 66 people; it was the worst air disaster in Hawai‘i history. The Islands were still four years from statehood and the business oligarchy known as the Big Five continued to dominate the local economy.
And Ethel and Joe Murphy launched a magazine in July called Hawaii Engineer. By August 1962, the monthly had morphed into Hawaii Business; today it’s known as the first and oldest regional business magazine in the country. That August cover asked, “Office Space: Is Honolulu oversupplied?” with pictures showing two office towers dominating an otherwise low-rise Honolulu skyline and an artist’s rendering of the proposed Bishop Insurance Building.
Now don’t confuse this with a spy story or a whodunit. There are no murders or alien abductions to read about. No, this is better than that, because it’s about entrepreneurs in a time when few knew the word and no Google search existed to help folks connect the dots.
It’s about a couple of dreamers who risked their savings to offer Hawai‘i a thoughtful monthly evaluation of the who, what, where, when, why and how of local business.
She Signed Humphrey Bogart’s Checks
But let’s start closer to the beginning.
Ethel Bolter was born in Salem, Oregon, in 1913, and raised by her lumberman father after her mother died. Joe served in the Navy and they met and married in California, when she was working in the business office at MGM Studios.
“She used to sign Humphrey Bogart’s checks and give him his paycheck at the end of the week,” Ethel’s step-grandson, New York architect Jeff Murphy, said in 2015.
The Murphys came to Hawai‘i in 1952 so Joe could sell vacuum cleaners door to door. But the young man was also a writer and, when vacuum-cleaner sales and sending stories to other magazines proved less than satisfying, a friend suggested the couple start their own publication. So they did.
Ethel was a pistol and Joe was no pushover either. Jeff remembers him as a loudmouth and another grandson, Hawai‘i’s Ross Conquest, said in 2015 that Joe’s standard place to interview new hires was his favorite bar.
“I hear a lot of stories about the interview process,” Conquest said with a laugh. “People would be interviewed by Kim (editor Kim Jacobsen) first and, then, if things went well, they’d be interviewed by Ethel, and, if they needed a third interview, it would be with Joe, who was running things outside the office and would interview people at the old Tropics bar.
“More than one person said their final interview was with Joe Murphy at the Tropics. In fact, Kim was hired at the bar. He’d recently moved to the Islands and was just having a beer and met Joe at the bar and started talking story. He said he was looking for a job and Joe said, ‘Well, I run a magazine.’ ”
That was that, and Jacobsen spent a lifetime at Hawaii Business, first as editor and then publisher, finally retiring around the time the magazine was sold in 1997 to aio and Pacific Basin Communications, the current parents of the publication.
Office Was Where Walmart Stands Today
Ethel Murphy lived and breathed the magazine. She was at the heart of Hawai‘i’s business world and each day meant another working lunch. Conquest remembered that she and Jacobsen sat at desks facing each other, in a Ke‘eaumoku Street building that looked like a World War II hangar.
“They used to call it Korea-moku because it was in the heart of all the Korean bars and nightclubs and restaurants,” Conquest said. “We grew up visiting the office on Ke‘eaumoku all the time. It was within walking distance of the Pagoda Hotel and where Walmart is today.”
Ethel and Joe ran the magazine together until Joe’s left-leaning convictions – he joined anti-Vietnam War protests – made it difficult for him to lead a business publication when most local companies were pro-military. He withdrew from daily office tasks but continued to provide input from a distance.
“As the story goes,” said grandson Jeff Murphy, “he couldn’t be politically active and protesting the Vietnam War and run a business magazine. Ethel, who also had political convictions, but wasn’t as militant as my grandfather, stayed on and continued to be the publisher well into her 80s – from the 1950s through the 1990s.”
It was the business acumen of both that created a long-lasting template for news coverage, which chronicled developments in Hawai‘i business and politics as the Islands transformed over time from a plantation economy into a modern society. The pages were filled with ads for companies that still exist today and others that have passed into posterity. Ringo Airways or States Line anyone?
Longtime Hawai‘i advertising executive Phil Kinnicutt worked for the Murphys twice, from 1963 to 1965 and 1969 to 1971. His final interview was also at the Tropics.
“We were a small group,” Kinnicutt said in 2015, “and we all did everything. I even opaqued negatives to get rid of the imperfections so you wouldn’t have black dots or squiggly lines.
“Every time the magazine was ready to be mailed, we’d pick it up in Kim’s blue Ford convertible with the top down. At the printers we’d put on the mailing labels, bundle them according to ZIP codes, deliver them to the post office, and then go out and have a beverage or two.”
Audit’s Recommendation: Publish on Time
Several years later, from 1977 to 1979, Kinnicutt was taking courses as part of the inaugural executive MBA class at UH Mānoa’s College of Business. A business audit was a capstone requirement of the program, so he put together an auditing team, with Hawaii Business as its subject. Through the audit, Kinnicutt’s group eventually made a number of recommendations to his old bosses.
“One of them was to bring the magazine out on time,” he said with a laugh. “In the good old days, it would be three or four weeks late. Whenever we came close to getting out on time, there would be a celebration. But, as the magazine became more and more sophisticated, that got better.”
Jeff Murphy saw his grandfather and step-grandmother as pioneers, creating a new life and a new business model in a new community. “I remember how impressed I was with that,” he said.
Their courage and chutzpah created a template for the whole family, certainly for him, he said.
“Ethel was a pretty savvy person,” he said, recalling the many visits he made to Hawai‘i in later years to see her and his grandfather. Though she’d never gone to college, Ethel had an innate business sense, he said.
“She was very beautiful, very dignified. Because of her personality she seemed bigger than life, though she was shorter in stature. When she said something, it wasn’t frivolous. She didn’t waste her words.
“The other thing that was pretty extraordinary was at a time when women were not so prominent in leadership roles in business, Ethel made this great business for herself and became someone really well known in the business community.”
Lived Life to the Fullest
Joe Murphy died Sept. 5, 1992 at the age of 77, 18 months after much of his esophagus was removed because of cancer. During those 18 months, he and Ethel lived life to the fullest. That included a three-month tour of Europe.
“We had Eurorail passes, and we went to eight countries to visit friends and relatives,” Ethel said after his death. “He was not as strong as before, but he was able to live a normal life. Then we came home for a few months and went on some more trips to the mainland.”
Ethel lived to be 101. She died in Honolulu on Oct. 9, 2014.
To New Jersey attorney Joel Murphy, Joe’s son from his first marriage, Hawaii Business was more than the nation’s first regional business magazine.
“It was a forerunner for all the state magazines all over the country,” Joel Murphy said. “This was the first one. Now every state in the union has a monthly magazine, but Hawaii Business was the first. And Hawai‘i wasn’t even a state yet.”
As Jeff Murphy and his father, Joel Murphy, reminisced, their stories created a picture of a dynamic couple who were committed members of their Hawai‘i community, who shared liberal politics and who loved to travel the world, especially by train.
“I remember my grandfather coming to New York one January in his aloha shirts and shorts,” says Jeff, “and walking around New York in 20-degree weather in that outfit and buying things like salami and bologna and taking them back to Honolulu because you couldn’t get that stuff.”
Jim Dowden, who in 2015 was the executive director of the national Alliance of Area Business Publications, confirmed Hawaii Business’ distinction as the oldest regional business magazine in the nation.
“I haven’t heard of anything older,” he said in 2015. “The oldest ones (on the mainland) would be Florida Trend, Georgia Trend and, maybe, Utah Business.”
