LIHUE — When George Thronas thinks about the legacy of his grandmother, Mary Kaliko Risner Thronas, one word comes to mind: family. “Although she was well-known for the work she did and the things she volunteered for, she still remained
LIHUE — When George Thronas thinks about the legacy of his grandmother, Mary Kaliko Risner Thronas, one word comes to mind: family.
“Although she was well-known for the work she did and the things she volunteered for, she still remained a very humble person and always taught us that family has to come first,” George Thronas said. “No matter how busy we are with work we have to remember that family can’t be replaced.”
Members of the family that she cherished surrounded Mary Saturday when she died, George said. She was 84.
George’s memories of his grandmother have a playful flavor.
“We would do yearly family vacation trips to our favorite place — Disneyland,” George said. “Then as some of us got older, we were able to go with her to her adult playground — Las Vegas.”
Mary was born in September of 1931 on Oahu and was raised in Waikiki. She graduated from McKinley High School and then joined Aloha Airlines as a flight attendant.
“From her travels, she then moved to Kauai and married my grandfather, (Sam Thronas) and started her family,” George said. “They started a construction business as well as cattle ranching, and believe it or not she did her fair share of work on the ranch.”
That mostly meant feeding the ranch hands and keeping them in line, George said.
Mary entered the political arena in 1962 as a Democratic convention delegate and was later appointed the governor’s liaison for Kauai. She served in that capacity under three different governors. She retired in January 1989.
“From then she continued on with volunteering with many different organizations on the island,” George said. “Then in 1996, she found her way back to the political arena again.”
That’s when Mary was elected as a chairwoman of the Kauai County Council, serving until 1998.
“In 1998, she ran for her bid for the mayor of Kauai and it was unsuccessful,” George said. “That was her last public service, but she spent the rest of her time from 1998 up until her passing volunteering for the causes that were important to her.”
Throughout her life, Mary was involved in countless organizations and community service projects including the Kauai Museum, Chamber of Commerce, Kauai Economic Opportunity and Zonta Club International.
She was a member of Zonta Club of Kauai and she was instrumental in establishing the Zonta Club of Hanalei.
According to Robin Savage, who helped lead the effort to organize the Zonta Club of Hanalei, Mary was the one who sponsored the club’s creation.
“Mary was very integral in creating our whole club,” Savage said. “Mary was our inspiration and all of us are sending emails back and forth about how she was so influential.”
In creating that club, Mary enlisted the help of one of her friends, Yoshiko “Dimples” Kano.
“It took us almost a year (to establish the Zonta Club of Hanalei),” Kano said. “I did the paperwork for her. We did great teamwork on that because we worked well together. She was good at putting thoughts together and I was good at manually getting it put together.”
Kano said Mary liked dedicating her time to the Zonta Club because it’s an international club with worldwide impact.
The two women were great friends, Kano said, and “bounced ideas off each other a lot.”
George said the family is still making service arrangements at this time.
“I think the biggest memory that I have is just the fact that wherever I would go, growing up here on the island, people would ask who is Mary to you (when they heard my name) and I would say ‘she is my grandmother’,” George said. “She’s such a well known woman.”
