LAIE, HAWAII
Each day around noon, when the Polynesian Cultural Center opens, a ceremony is held at the entrance in which the flags of the United States, the state of Hawaii and the several island nations represented at the facility are raised.
It might be regarded as daily tribute to the vision in 1921 that guided Elder David O. McKay, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve who was on a world tour. Visiting a small, Church-owned elementary school in the small temple town of Laie, he was impressed by a flag-raising ceremony by the children at the school, among them American, Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese and Filipino.
"The Church of Christ will truly make of all nations one blood," he recorded in his journal. "May God hasten the day when this is accomplished."
He saw the fulfillment of that dream with the establishment of the Church College of Hawaii in 1955.
Later, Elder Matthew Cowley of the Quorum of the Twelve, in counsel with Edward Clissold, a counselor in the Oahu Stake presidency and Wendell B. Mendenhall, one of Elder Cowley's former New Zealand missionaries, envisioned a facility in which the Maori and other islanders could support themselves at the school while singing and dancing for tourists.
"I'm very grateful for President McKay's prophecy and the vision of those four men and all those who followed them," said David Hanneman, 87, the center's first full-time employee. "I had no idea that a center would be as beautiful and as big as it is today."
Born in Western Samoa in 1926, he became successful in business in the United States before being tapped to bring food services to the center after it was founded in 1963.
With an encyclopedic memory about the center, he remembers the labor missionaries of the Church whose efforts were indispensable to the center's construction.
Among those was Sione Tulione Pulotu of Tonga. At the 50th anniversary commemoration, he recalled that it was an answer to his personal prayer that he be sent to Hawaii to fulfill his labor mission and work on the center and other projects.
He danced at the dedication of the center in 1951. And he danced at the "Golden Alumni Show" as part of the 50th anniversary commemoration.
"I told people, 'I danced at the beginning, and this may be my last one,' " he said.
(For information on the Polynesian Cultural Center's 50th anniversary, visit this site: www.polynesia.com)
