Sin In Paradise

Last week Joseph M. Cummings, a Honolulu machinery dealer, ran a newspaper advertisement headlined: WHERE OUTLAW PROSTITUTES LIVE IN HONOLULU.The ad named residential areas, including Waikiki, exclusive ManulaniHeights and St. Louis Heights, and listed the number of prostitutes whohad homes in each.

Kaimuki Waikiki Post 3865 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars publicly viewed the situation with alarm. Editorialized the Honolulu Star-Bulletin: "Something must be done. . . ." The Federal Security Agency ordered a top official to the Islands to investigate.

Honolulu's red-light district is small and sad--20 frame houses straggling along alleys near a brackish river called Nuuanu Stream. But since Pearl Harbor it has profited fabulously because thousands of soldiers, sailors and civilian workers have funneled into the Island of Oahu. The Army & Navy, which cracked down on open prostitution in the continental U.S., had winked at it in Honolulu, perhaps because the venereal rate remained extremely low.

As a result the red-light district's gross earnings have skyrocketed to unheard-of levels and its veteran harlots have grown rich.

The harlots had made so much money that they had moved into good homes in some of Honolulu's best residential districts. When Advertiser Cummings publicized this fact, some public indignation sprang from the mistaken belief that the places he listed were houses of prostitution rather than homes of prostitutes.

Aroused by the public outcry, Honolulu police made the rounds telling prostitutes to move out of their homes in residential districts. This produced a wave of indignation from the prostitutes. They had pitched in and rolled bandages for the Red Cross after Pearl Harbor. One madam boasts a citation from Henry Morgenthau for selling $132,000 worth of bonds during the Fifth War Loan Drive. To be asked to move out of their private homes seemed to members of the oldest profession unfair discrimination against patriotic citizens.

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