The veterans of the Pacific Theater were invited on stage to join the hula dancers.
He would tell the men from the European Theater, "you got your glory in the movies" that they could watch. He would ask for all the Pearl Harbor survivors to stand. Don Ho enjoyed asking for a show of hands of veterans of World War II. In his stage show, Ho would make jokes about being sent in the mid-1950s to Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi and being Hawaiian. From 1964 to 1969, Don's backing group was The Aliis: Al Akana, Rudy Aquino, Benny Chong, Manny Lagodlagod and Joe Mundo. Another song associated with Don was " Pearly Shells". In the fall of 1966, Ho released his most famous song, " Tiny Bubbles", which charted on both the pop (#57 Billboard) and easy listening charts and caused his subsequent album, also called " Tiny Bubbles", to remain in the album Top 200 for almost a year. In 1966 he released his second album, a live compilation called Don Ho – Again!, which charted in the early part of that year. 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. Ho was originally signed to Reprise Records. After much success, and little room to grow, promoter Kimo Wilder McVay sought Don to play at a night club called Duke's owned by Duke Kahanamoku, where he caught the attention of record company officials. In 1963, he moved the Kāneʻohe Honey's to Waikīkī. Ho always honored the military remembering his own years of military service. Honey's became a hotspot for the local entertainment and the growing customers from the Kaneohe Marine Base servicemen. Ho left the United States Air Force in 1959 due to his mother's developing illness and began singing at her club in Kaneohe. While in the military, Ho traveled from state to state with his young family until he was called home to help his mother with the family bar business called Honey's. They were married for 48 years, until Melva's death on June 8, 1999. She was the mother to his first six children. Transferred to Travis AFB, California, he went to the local city of Concord and bought an electronic keyboard from a music store, and recalls, "That's when it all started."ĭon married his high school sweetheart, Melva May Kolokea Wong, on November 22, 1951. In 1954, Ho entered the United States Air Force doing his primary training at Columbus AFB, Mississippi and spent time flying C-97s with the Military Air Transport Service. He was a graduate of the Kamehameha Schools in 1949 and he attended Springfield College on a football scholarship in 1950, but returned home to earn a Bachelor's degree in sociology at University of Hawai'i in 1953. He was born in the small Honolulu neighborhood of Kakaʻako to Emily (Honey) Leimaile Silva and James Ah You Puao Ho, but he grew up in Kāneʻohe on the windward side of the island of Oʻahu. Ho was a singer of Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and German descent.
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