Emerald City Rollers

Imagine a hockey game, but replace the ice with a roller rink. Swap out the baggy jerseys for fishnet hose and tank tops, and abandon ordinary names in favor of pseudonyms like Tanya Hyde and Demi Gore. What you have is a reasonable facsimile of women's roller derby. The scoring is completely different, but both sports are rowdy, raucous and sometimes punctuated with fights between the players.

Ho, of mixed Chinese, Hawaiian, Portuguese, Dutch, and German descent, was born in the small Honolulu neighborhood of Kakaʻako, but he grew up in Kāneʻohe on the windward side of the island of Oʻahu. He was a graduate of the Kamehameha Schools in 1949 and he attended Springfield College in 1950, but returned home to earn a bachelor's degree in sociology at University of Hawai'i in 1953. In 1954 Ho entered the United States Air Force and spent time flying fighter jets in both Texas and Hawaii.

Ho left the Air Force in 1959 due to his mother's illness and began singing at his mother's club, Honey's. In 1962, he moved from Kāneʻohe to Waikīkī in Honolulu and played at a night club called Duke's owned by Duke Kahanamoku, where he caught the attention of record company officials.

Ho was originally signed to Reprise Records. Ho released his debut album, Don Ho Show, in 1965 and began to play high profile locations in Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, and New York City. In 1966 he released his second album, a live compilation called Don Ho — Again!, which charted in the early part of that year. In the fall of 1966, Ho released his most famous song, "Tiny Bubbles", which charted on both the pop (#8 Billboard) and easy listening charts and caused the subsequent Tiny Bubbles LP to remain in the album Top 20 for almost a year.Another song that was familiar with Don was the song "Pearly Shells". Guest appearances on television shows such as I Dream of Jeannie, The Brady Bunch, Sanford and Son, Charlie's Angels, and Fantasy Island soon followed. Although his album sales peaked in the late 1960s, he was able to land a television spot on ABC from October 1976 to March 1977 with the Don Ho Show variety program which aired on weekday mornings.

My camera never felt more patriotic.

We're back from 5 days in DC! What a wonderful city, we
loved riding the Metro, all the art, and all the history.
Springtime in DC was warm and beautiful, we are lightly
toasted with tired feet. More pics later....