The Spring that Baseball Came to Hāna: The Little-Known Story of Paul Fagan and the 1947 San Francisco Seals

Before there were tourists in Hāna, there were Seals.

In 1947, Hāna played host to spring training for the San Francisco Seals, a minor-league baseball team from the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. While professional clubs have held preseason practice in warm-weather cities across Florida and Arizona since the late 1800s, few fans associate baseball of any season with the quiet town of Hāna. It’s a little-known chapter in both baseball lore and the story of Maui.

The affair was conceived by Paul Fagan, a California entrepreneur and the majority stakeholder in the Seals organization, but Fagan’s own business interests went far beyond baseball.

Eager to attract visitors to Hāna (and his newly updated resort), Fagan announced that he would bring his Seals in for spring training. His plan was to fly in a slew of prominent sportswriters to chronicle the camp, confident they would gush about the setting and Fagan’s hotel.

The writers did, indeed, wax poetic. Harry Borba, who covered the Seals for the San Francisco Examiner, wrote “The place beggars description. The Seals should pay for the privilege of training in such indescribably beautiful surroundings.”

Even the near drowning of San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Bucky Walter didn’t dissuade the scribes from singing the praises of “heavenly Hāna,” circulating a nickname that lives on today.

Read my full story "The Spring that Baseball Came to Hāna: The Little-Known Story of Paul Fagan and the 1947 San Francisco Seals" in the current issue of Maui No Ka ‘Oi Magazine. 

(Photograph by San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)

Steps and Stories: A Brief History of Kīhei with Maui Walking Tours

Keith DeVey wants everyone to know more about Maui. Twice a week, he offers a free historic walking tour of Kīhei, eager to share the island’s stories with anyone interested.

The founder of Maui Walking Tours launched his outings in March 2024. Early walks attracted modest attention, but word of mouth has since pushed most tours to capacity – about two dozen participants.

“I genuinely believe Maui is the best place on Earth,” DeVey said. “I wanted to start a free walking tour to show visitors why.”

Walking tours are popular in many destinations around the world, drawing travelers who seek authentic experiences and a deeper connection to the places they visit. DeVey is a seasoned city walker, having joined more than 30 tours in places like Reykjavik, Paris, London and Tokyo, as well as cities from San Francisco to Key West. He saw an opportunity to apply the walking-tour formula to Kīhei, inspired by how these experiences had helped him connect more deeply to the places he visited.

DeVey’s one-mile, 90-minute Kīhei walk, which begins at the library and weaves through Kalama Park, feels less like a lecture and more like “talk story” with a local. Topics span what makes South Maui unique – from culturally significant spaces and native flora to marine life, the area’s ties to the U.S. military, the rise and fall of agriculture and the growth of tourism.

Click here to read the full story in Maui No Ka Oi Magazine. 

Cool Cat Cafe Opens in Kīhei: What’s ‘Old’ is New Again for the Former Front Street Eatery

For two decades, Cool Cat Cafe was an iconic Lāhainā Front Street restaurant. The old-time, 1950s diner at the Wharf Cinema Center was known for its award-winning hamburgers and elevated view of Lāhainā’s famous banyan tree.

The wildfires of August 2023 claimed the restaurant and changed the face of Front Street forever, but a new chapter in the Cool Cat Cafe story is being written in Kīhei. Founder Sean Corpuel reopened the cafe in South Maui this past June, barely 10 months after the fires.

The new restaurant at Kukui Mall, most recently occupied by Sansei Seafood Restaurant & Sushi Bar, has been fully updated and is appropriately awash in red and chrome and nostalgia.

Click here to read the full story on Cool Cat Cafe in Maui No Ka Oi Magazine.

Raising Spirits: How one tequila lover turned a Makawao bike park into Hawaii’s only blue agave distillery.

 

A heavy mist rolled across Makawao. The moisture enveloped Paul Turner’s agave fields and triggered a heady petrichor, the unmistakable scent of wet Earth.

“The plants are happy here,” said Turner, owner of Waikulu Distillery, a farm-to-bottle maker of blue agave spirits. “It’s a perfect crop for Hawai‘i.”

What began as an experiment with just a handful of plants has grown into a budding adult beverage business. Waikulu is the only distillery in Hawai‘i producing agave spirits, a distilled alcohol similar to tequila. The word “waikulu” in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i means “dripping water” and has historically been used to describe distilling alcohol, which drips slowly from the still.

Turner’s farm is home to some 3,000 agave tequilana destined for distillation. The spiky, blue-green plants, arranged in tidy rows across six acres, take roughly seven years to mature. The plant’s compact, bulbous core, known as the piña, is harvested by hand and brought to the property’s distinct, turquoise barn, where it’s cooked, crushed, fermented and distilled. About half of the spirits produced are placed in barrels for aging, while the rest are bottled and sold as a crisp, unaged “silver.” Both aged and unaged varieties are offered in the adjacent tasting room, which opened to visitors in 2023.

Agave aficionados tend to be extremely passionate. In fact, many of the young distillery’s visitors are tequila drinkers that spontaneously stop in after spying the agave fields from Baldwin Avenue.

“They’re driving by, and they see the plants, and they U-turn and come in, and they’re just like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

Click here to read the full story on Waikulu Distillery from the May/June 2024 issue of Maui No Ka Oi Magazine.