Movie star Harold Lloyd visits Kauai

On Wednesday, May 3, 1967, silent film actor Harold Lloyd (1893-1971) visited Kauai for the first time as a guest of the Kauai Shrine Club and participated in a radio broadcast interview with KTOH Radio’s Jaime B. “Braddah Kimo” Nelmida at the station’s studio on Ahukini Road, Lihue.

“Braddah Kimo” — who’d later broadcast at radio station KUAI 720, and who performed as a musician at the old Kauai Surf Hotel on Kalapaki Bay, and the Kauai Resort — learned, as did his radio audience, that Lloyd had been a former Imperial Potentate within the Shrine of North America, a fraternal organization appendant to Freemasonry.

Nelmida’s listeners were also informed that Lloyd had dedicated a new Shriners Hospital for Children in Honolulu just prior to his Kauai trip — one of 22 Shriners Hospitals for Children it currently administers in the United States.

Harold Lloyd was one of the most popular comedic actors — along with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton — of the silent film era.

All told, Lloyd made almost 200 comedy films between 1914 and 1947, in a career that began in silent films and extended into the sound film era, which got underway with the release of the first feature “talkie,” the “Jazz Singer,” in October 1927.

Many of Lloyd’s movies contained scenes of him performing daredevil stunts, most notably, the clip in “Safety Last,” in which Lloyd is seen hanging from the hands of a large clock on a building high above a city street.

At the time of his interview with “Braddah Kimo,” Lloyd made his home in his Beverly Hills, California mansion, called “Greenacres,” which featured 44 rooms, 26 bathrooms, 12 fountains, 12 gardens, a nine-hole golf course and wonderful full-size, year-round, indoor Christmas tree decorated to the hilt to look like a glittering jewel.

In 1953, Lloyd received a special Academy Award for being a “master comedian and good citizen.”