Broadcast veteran Don McCoy, who attended the University of Southern California when “Boss Radio” signed on in 1965, calls the promotion, “The biggest and best external listener event in the history of L.A. radio.”
I have a been a friend of Chris and his older brother Dietrich, the noted Hawai’i Island print maker, for a half-century. The two brothers were born in a Berlin neighborhood when Hitler was on his way to taking Germany to Hell. Their father, Friedrich Donat, was a high-ranking civil engineer who designed landing fields for the Luftwaffe (the German air force), as well as Hitler’s underground headquarters, called Führerbun. Although not a member of the Nazi party, Donat could not leave the country in fear of Hitler’s wrath.
Father Friedrich and mother Ursula, a schoolteacher, clearly envisioned their homeland’s future. Leaving Herr Donat, she smuggled her sons out of Berlin in a large baby carriage. It also contained valuables and a gun under the blankets. She remarried Manuel Varez, a U. S. Army sergeant from Hawai’i. He supervised housing at Fort Kamehameha, on the banks of Pearl Harbor. Living there amongst the families of high-ranking officers, the young, German-speaking boys fell in love with the ocean, its creatures and ships of every type.
I met the Varez brothers when my new 1958 Pontiac Bonneville coupe was O'ahu’s king of the road. The beast was “souped up” in every manner possible until it was achieving about five miles a gallon, which cost 28 cents. Chris and his brother had moved to Kailua, on O’ahu’s windward side. The younger Varez’s part time job was working the late shift at the village’s only service station.
When word spread through Andy’s Drive-In that “Da Bonneville” was heading for Kailua town, usually at three o’clock in the morning, Chris raced back to work and turned on a gas pump for us. Back then, new racing parts required 200 miles of slow driving to break in, which meant cruising around the island several times, usually in the middle of the night.
Chris and I next encountered each other when I cast him to play the role of KHJ Radio’s “Big Kahuna.” Former KHJ listener and groupie, Kevin Gershan, now a producer for Entertainment Tonight and other TV shows, says, “At one point the Big Kahuna was bigger than all the Boss Jocks combined. Now, several of those deejays have stars on Hollywood Walk of Fame, but in the summer of 1966, in every high school from Santa Barbara to San Bernardino to San Diego, the Big Kahuna was king.”
The character was based on my Honolulu roots, plus dealing with a mythical machine that our competition presented during the 1963 Fresno County Fair. The clanking low-tech device was named the KYNO Money Monster. It handed out dollars bills while traipsing through the crowds. He was looked down on upon by our presentation: KMAK’s “Sunny Jim” Price, who was suspended five stories above the event, living for a week inside the KMAK Kruiser. Price went unnoticed because everyone on the midway was chasing the metallic monster.
Most West Coast native Hawaiians were concentrated in and around Orange County. These folks are typically shy types, with little desire for outlandish theatricality. Most of them could not visualize the weird things about to happen in the name of a kahuna (priest, sorcerer, magician, wizard, minister, expert in any profession, whether male or female.)
There were trepidations. Never would I use that word in a commercial context back home in Hawai’i. Fearful that I was bandying about the word in a rock’n’roll context would bring bad luck from across the Pacific Ocean, to Hollywood. In common usage today, the word kahuna has been replaced by kahu (honored attendant, guardian, nurse, keeper of ʻunihipili bones, regent, administrator, warden, caretaker, master, mistress; pastor, minister, reverend, or preacher of a church; one who has a dog, cat, pig, or other pet.)
Dreaming about all this in my office at 5515 Melrose Avenue, the big problem was finding an actor to play the part. Nowhere in the Screen Actor's Guild was a young dude who could pull this off. The gig would pay $400 a week plus use of a new Boss Mustang. But, I knew no one of Polynesian descent in the area. The character must speak authentic Hawai’i Pidgin English—and the quasi Polynesian, or Honolulu street names, that would become scripted words by Promotion Director Don Berrigan and myself: fake grunts, growls and giggles–in scripts to come. These lines had to be read in a studio or from a pay phone booth being knocked over by screaming teenagers. I located Chris in Chicago, where he was a roadie traveling with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. He instantly accepted my offer, flew to L.A., spent hours in a tanning salon and was outfitted at Western Costume to look as if he had just emerged from the mysterious jungle.
One day, KHJ chief production engineer Bill Mouzis (left) and I brought The Big Kahuna to Dodger Stadium to see the hottest team in baseball, led by their twin Hall of Fame pitchers, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. When the crowd first spotted Chris in his multi-colored feathered cape, whale bone neck pieces and tapa cloth sarong, most everyone took their eyes off the playing field and tried to get a look at, or autograph from, L.A.’s biggest radio star. The promotion ran for two dozen Bossterical weeks.
It all remains well remembered to this day by those drawn into the spell of the character played by Chris Varez . KHJ’s Big Kahuna was the original, followed by copycat radio stations, surf shops, graffiti, bumper stickers, restaurants, clubs and endless products wishing identification with Hawai’i. Kahuni filled the airwaves, but there was no Chris Variez in the copycat towns. To me, still the most puzzling fact about those times was that no one ever questioned why the "kahuna" was Caucasian. WTF?
After eloping with a KHJ secretary from the promotion department, Varez headed for the Virgin Islands. By then, thinking he had acquired personal super powers, Varez ended up in jail for “Piracy on the High Seas,” a story that I never got 100% straight.
In the late 1970s, Varez returned to the islands to become a fisherman in Kona on the Big Island. There a neophyte captain speared Varez’s foot, leaving him partially disabled. Varez returned to O’ahu after the turn of the century. A bit after Y2K Chris was my roommate for two years in the hilltop house where I lived in Kane’ohe. That house recently burned down. Now I live 800-feet makai (towards the sea.) The last thing I took with me on the way out the back door was the wishbone for the turkey Chris made on Thanksgiving 1998, which had hung there ever since.
Chris Varez is survived by brother Dietrich and wife Linda, several children from two marriages and other family members. Varez spent his last days in Koloa, Kaua’i with a former wife, who tended to his needs until he recently was admitted to Wilcox Memorial Hospital. He quietly passed away this morning. The cause of death apparently was the continuing loss of oxygen. He was breathing with assistance of an oxygen tank the last time I hung out with him in Kailua, in 2007 (upper right.)
When today’s NFL games are finished—I froze them on TiVo when Dietrich called me with the news as Jordan King sang the national anthem, at 9:55 a.m. HST. When today’s football is pau, I am driving to Kailua Beach Park and jump into the Pacific Ocean, to remember my dear friend and consummate showman, the immortal, one-and only Big Kahuna.
Ron Jacobs
Kaneohe, Hawai’i
For more information: Google The KHJ Big Kahuna, check out the work of D.Varez on eBay and/or contact Ron Jacobs at rj@hawaii.rr.com.
PS - It is now 6 p.m. and the sun is setting behind the Ko'olau Mountains. When I went to finally watch football, I discovered that I failed to hit "record" for the Viking-Saints game.
Which bounced me back to our times together, me and Chris. Many things were re-aligned in both our brains as we synched up and survived, depending on each other. Kahuna Chris was a great cook, grilled ahi fresh from He'iea Pier being his ono speciality.
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