Sara Gadarian shows off her pulpit-turned-liquor-cabinet Thursday morning in her Lahaina garage. In the 1970s, Gadarian’s late husband, Arsene “Blackie” Gadarian, rigged the top of the pulpit to rise and reveal a secret stash of liquor. The pulpit is one of the many knickknacks and treasures Sara Gadarian is selling May 12. “It’s time” to downsize, she said. -- The Maui News / COLLEEN UECHI photo
The pulpit in Sara Gadarian’s garage looks like any respectable preacher’s pulpit — a carved wooden stand with a small cup for offerings.
But press a button and the motorized lectern rises to reveal Gadarian’s secret liquor stash — bottles of wine, gin and bourbon whiskey.
It was over this pulpit that Gadarian’s late husband, Arsene “Blackie” Gadarian, officiated a half-dozen weddings in the Lahaina bar the couple ran from 1981 to 1995. It’s also symbolic of Blackie Gadarian himself — ironic, irreverent and full of surprises.
“Things always had to be not ordinary,” Sara Gadarian said, which applies to both her 53-year marriage to Blackie as well as the dozens of knickknacks the couple acquired over the years.
Five years after her husband’s death, Sara Gadarian will auction off the pulpit and 83 other items on May 12. Proceeds from the pulpit — which starts for sale at $500 — will go toward the Blackie Gadarian Memorial Vocational Scholarship for Lahainaluna students. The rest is “going to help Sara enjoy the rest of her life,” Sara Gadarian quipped.
“Blackie and Sara’s Treasures” include gifts from friends, handmade items by Blackie and old decor from the former Blackie’s Bar. -- The Maui News / COLLEEN UECHI photo
“My son is very happy that I’m downsizing at age 83,” she said. “It’s time, and let somebody else enjoy it.”
The eclectic collection ranges from a topless mannequin that once hung from the cupola of Blackie’s Bar to a sticker-covered storage cabinet, jazz records recorded live at the bar and Blackie’s iconic bright-orange uniform shirts. Handmade and personalized items reflect his signature humor, such as the golf club printed with the words “Cheat to win!” and rubber stamps declaring “up yours.”
“People came back to the bar partly for the experience of meeting Blackie to see if they could finally win him over,” Sara Gadarian said.
The tough exterior was as much nature as it was necessity. Born Sept. 18, 1921, Blackie Gadarian grew up the son of Armenian immigrants who survived the Armenian genocide. He adopted their survival instincts, and even though “he had the intelligence to go to college,” he skipped out to learn the machinist trade so he could earn money during the Great Depression, Sara Gadarian said. The family’s escape from the at-times claustrophobic slums of New York City was a trip to the beach every summer.
“He hated being inside, so the minute World War II started, he volunteered for the Navy,” Sara Gadarian said.
A selection of Blackie’s Boat Yard uniform shirts hangs in the Gadarians’ garage. The shirts on the far left were for traveling, and Blackie Gadarian insisted on wearing them even in elegant European restaurants. -- The Maui News / COLLEEN UECHI photo
Blackie Gadarian served as a mechanic on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. While spending his first Christmas overseas in Hawaii, he went for a swim at Nanakuli Beach. For a New York native who’d trained in the brisk cold of Chicago, going for a swim in the middle of winter was almost unthinkable.
“He never forgot that,” Sara Gadarian said.
Eager for warmer climates, Blackie Gadarian moved to Southern California after the war to work as an aircraft mechanic for Western Airlines. It was there that the company’s white owners dubbed him “Blackie” because he was the “only dark-skinned person who wasn’t a ship cleaner.” Racist?
“Of course,” Sara Gadarian said.
In 1958, the then Sara Richardson met Blackie Gadarian. They both worked at AiResearch Aviation Service Co. in Los Angeles.
“It was a company romance,” Sara Gadarian said with a smile.
Her first impression of him was “dark, handsome, sense of humor,” an attraction that solidified at the company’s annual holiday dance. He asked her to dance and proved to be a “fabulous” partner. From then on, they bonded over their mutual love of jazz, dancing and going to the beach. Sara Gadarian was a Glendale, Calif., native who grew up loving the ocean.
They both had children from previous marriages.
In 1960, they married and moved into a rundown summer cottage on a bluff in Corona del Mar, at the time a sleepy village that would grow into a bustling port town — much like Lahaina when the Gadarians moved to Maui.
In 1964, the Gadarians started Blackie’s Boat Yard, a dry dock and boat repair business in Newport Beach. They fixed up a 1913 tugboat and used it to haul in boats.
“He hated to go out on boats, but he loved to admire boats, and he knew how to fix them,” said Sara Gadarian, who also opened Sara’s Marine Salvage to sell used boating equipment.
But even living on the beach in California, Blackie Gadarian never forgot the warm waters of Hawaii. After multiple vacations to the islands, the Gadarians decided they would get their kids through school and then move to Maui. They worked out a long-term lease for a property across from the Lahaina cannery in 1976 and opened Blackie’s Boat Yard for repairs and boat storage.
Three years later, they moved to Maui full time. Blackie Gadarian started Blackie’s Machine Shop at the boatyard. His first major job was fabricating polished brass railings and bird rings for the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa.
Opening Blackie’s Bar above the boatyard was “the ultimate ego trip, Blackie called it.”
“Every man who’s successful in business should own a bar once. Those are his exact (words),” Sara Gadarian said.
It was also inspired by the impending closure of the couple’s favorite watering hole — the Windsock Lounge, a four-seat dive at the Royal Hawaiian Air Service terminal of the Kaanapali Airport. Unable to convince the owners to move the Windsock Lounge to the boatyard, the Gadarians decided to build their own bar. After the lounge closed in 1986, they had the roof transported to the boatyard to attach to Blackie’s Bar.
The spiraling staircase to Blackie’s Bar was lined with photos of shipwrecks, in an effort to hammer home the motto of “Promote safe boating — Stay ashore and drink at Blackie’s Bar.” The open-air gazebo bar and restaurant offered “Maui’s coldest beer,” burgers, Mexican food and live jazz four nights a week.
Patrons who met Blackie Gadarian knew him for his “brusque” exterior, Sara Gadarian said. They started posing for pictures while flipping the bird in honor of his “up the world” attitude — an image that Blackie Gadarian would later print on his business cards. But his toughness also translated to respect.
“The reputation always went out that Blackie’s a tough man to deal with, but he does great work,” Sara Gadarian said.
In 1995, the couple closed the bar, sold the boatyard and moved the machine shop to a building on Luakini Street. The former boatyard later became the Shell gas station and convenience store on Kapunakea Street. The Gadarians still carried on traditions started at the bar — producing jazz events in Lahaina and raising funds for Lahainaluna graduates. Since 1981, they’ve given 212 scholarships totaling $112,400 to graduates going into automotive or carpentry trades.
On July 21, 2013, Blackie Gadarian died at the age of 91.
When asked if it was bittersweet to auction off items gathered over decades of marriage, Sara Gadarian paused.
“No,” she finally said, “because part of it is that all the memories are still there. It’s things. It represents the feeling, but it’s not the people.”
Every treasure has a back story. There’s the topless mannequin — named after Mary Jo Kopechne — that was a gift from the editor of the Newport Daily Pilot. (Kopechne was a Capitol Hill staffer who died in a car accident at Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., in 1969 while she was a passenger in a car driven by then U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy.) After a friend sculpted Mary Jo’s hands and enhanced her breasts, the mannequin took up a proud place on the deck of the Gadarians’ tugboat, where she elicited plenty of double takes and chuckles from fellow boaters in Newport Harbor.
There are the bright orange “Blackie’s Boat Yard” uniform shirts; the ones with the crisper labels were for traveling, and Blackie Gadarian never let a dress code keep him from getting into a posh European restaurant. (He claimed orange was “the only neutral color he knew,” according to the couple’s website mauiblackie.com.)
Then there are the odds and ends that Blackie Gadarian started making in his spare time, like the bells fashioned from dive tanks or the watches encased in resin labeled “time stands still.”
And, of course, there’s the pulpit of the Lahaina First Chapel — also known as the bar — which Sara Gadarian found in a Newport Beach used furniture store. Blackie Gadarian and a friend rigged the top of the pulpit to rise up and reveal a stash of liquor to the soundtrack of ominous organ music. He put the pulpit to good use after obtaining his minister’s license in Hawaii.
The memories are mostly what Sara Gadarian plans to take with her after she sells their former home and machine shop and moves to a condo in Kahana. She said it was her husband’s sense of humor that kept them married over 53 years.
“He could never tell jokes. His humor was all from his head and his history,” she said. “He capitalized sometimes on being an outsider. . . . He never insulted people, ever.”
“Blackie and Sara’s Treasures” can be previewed online at 32auctions.com/Sara2018. Participants can bid until 6 a.m. on May 12; the highest bidders are then entered to bid by proxy at the live auction, which starts at 10 a.m. on May 12 at 622 Luakini St. in Lahaina. Participants can view the items in person from 8 to 9:45 a.m. Items must be picked up that day, or they can be shipped through Mail Services Plus.
For more information, contact sara@mauisarajazz.com.
* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.
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