Eighteen years after Iwaji Minato finished his contract as a plantation worker near Hilo, he got himself a secondhand Ford ($500) and a chauffeur's license. Minato would take the jitney, with a few covered seats in the back, on seven trips a day between Hilo and Hakalau. That year, 1913, the "land sampan," named for its resemblance to a fishing boat, was born. Nine years later, an enterprising driver extended his jitney's back to fit more passengers. The small, open-air bus (also known as a "banana wagon") could seat about a dozen. By the 1930s, sampan buses formed the backbone of the island's early transit system, with some two hundred in operation. "Hilo's motor transportation facilities are generally conceded to be unsurpassed in the islands, both in cheapness and in service," the Honolulu Star-Bulletin declared three years later.
But soon the personal vehicle was on the rise. Demand dwindled. By 1969, only a dozen drivers were left in Hilo. Six years later, the county council wanted safer alternatives. Buses with the long, familiar boxy shape were rolling out, but one reluctant councilman deplored their look, calling for an option "other than one with a distinctive Mainland flavor." In December 1975, the county bought out the last five sampan drivers in Hilo.
This history was Ryon Rickard's obsession. He purchased one of Hawaii's last sampans-a 1950 Chevrolet that had moonlighted as a clown car-and invested six figures into restoring it, winning top honors in the 2011 Grand National Roadster Show. When Rickard passed away recently, the sampan went up for auction. Rickard's Punahou buddy, Cully Judd, snapped it up, and the gleaming red vision now sits in a cavernous storage house in Kapolei. A caretaker takes it out once a week to run the engine, but given that it's one of the last-if not the last-of its kind in Hawaii, Judd thinks it's worth showing off.
And so recently the bus crossed a quiet industrial street, trundled the length of the block and banked a slow U-turn to rest by the curb. "Beautiful car," a guy passing in a lifted pickup said. The painted number 13 aft of the entryway signifies the passenger capacity; a wooden step up is the only way in. Inside, plush leather couch seats wrap around the caramel wooden floor in a U-shape under a dark, ribbed wooden ceiling. Rolled up rain covers hang from the sides, and a bell hangs above the driver's shoulder.
Minato, the first sampan driver, logged almost half a million miles over his thirty-seven years driving the Hilo-Hakalau route. "I like job very much. No more bus, I get homesick," he told a local paper. "Anyway, bus more better than hoe-hana"-that is, plantation work.
