Talking Hawai`i's Story: Oral Histories of an Island People

BUILDING A BETTER HAWAI‘I

FREDERICK P. LOWREY BUILDING A BETTER HAWAI‘I One of our many good Japanese contractors must have had about twenty men on the job painting the roof that day. I’ll never forget this picture of these guys, up on the roof, with the shrapnel falling, and they all started climbing off. I called them together and told them we had been attacked by the Japanese, and that I thought the best thing for them would be to go home because I didn’t know what the heck the army was going to do. Frederick P. Lowrey, the oldest of Frederick D. and Leila Lowrey’s six children , was born in 1911 in Honolulu. He grew up in Mänoa and was educated at Punahou School, Phillips Academy, and Harvard University. In 1934, Lowrey started as an inventory clerk at Lewers & Cooke, Ltd., where his father , and grandfather before him, served as president. Lowrey left in 1935 to attend Harvard Business School. On his return to Lewers & Cooke, he worked in various capacities, including personnel department manager, manager in charge of operations, manager in charge of government sales, and corporate secretary. Lowrey was appointed vice president of Lewers & Cooke in 1953 and president in 1956. In 1966, when Lewers & Cooke merged with U.S. Plywood, Lowrey resigned from U.S. Plywood but stayed on as president of L & C, Limited, a holding company. He retired in 1968 after overseeing the merger of L & C, Limited with Dillingham Corporation. Lowrey married Janet Meyer in 1937. They had a son and four daughters . Lowrey was active in the Outrigger Canoe Club, city planning commission , Young Men’s Christian Association, Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club of Honolulu, and other community organizations. Fred Lowrey died in 2002 at age ninety. Lowrey, “Building a Better Hawai‘i” 175 On December 7, 1941, during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, stray American anti-aircraft shells landed on the Lewers & Cooke headquarters, lumberyard, and warehouse. No one was hurt, but it signaled the beginning of major changes for the company as private construction diminished and military construction boomed. Because he possessed unique knowledge as a department manager of Hawai‘i’s largest lumber and building supply store, Lowrey was interviewed in 1992 by Warren Nishimoto for An Era of Change: Oral Histories of Civilians in World War II Hawai‘i. Lowrey’s interviews highlight the stark bureaucratic realities the territory experienced under martial law between 1941 and 1944. FAMILY AND BUSINESS My father and mother had been married very early in 1911. They were married in Santa Rosa, California, and then went down to the Grand Canyon for a honeymoon, then came right to Honolulu. They stayed with my grandfather and grandmother [Frederick J. and Cherilla Lowrey], who lived at Lunalilo and Victoria Street. Anyway, I was born in that house, in November of that year. They had already drawn plans for a house up Mänoa. This was an interesting house; it was built on the side of the hill, which was fairly steep there, so it had a fairly big basement in it. Sometimes when my family would go off to the Mainland and take the younger kids, they’d leave John and me—we’re the two oldest—with my grandfather. His sister [Ida Lowrey Castle] had come down to Honolulu when she was sixteen years old. My family were staunch Congregationalists, and of course, the missionaries down here were staunch Congregationalists, so she got to know a lot of the kids of them. And I guess among those that she met was W. R. Castle [whom she married in 1875]. She kept writing letters back to the family in Oakland, saying what a wonderful place it was, and what the opportunities were here. So my grandfather decided, gee, maybe this was the place to come to. He started in as a bookkeeper at Lewers & Cooke in 1879. He was a whiz at figures. He could take a column of figures, and go down it like this, and add it up, and come out (chuckles). As a matter of fact, I can tell you a story, that when Lewers & Cooke bought their first adding machine, he wouldn’t trust it. (Laughs.) He taught me my first lessons about the use of debt. He made the remark that all debts are always repaid. He meant by this that if the borrower does not repay the lender who loans the money, then the money is not repaid and the lender pays the bill to...