Kilauea Drama & Entertainment Network’s Living History program
Kīlauea Drama & Entertainment Network’s Living History program, “A Walk into the Past,” will take a two-week break.
There will be no shows on Sept. 27 and Oct. 4.
The program will resume on Oct. 11, and will repeat every Tuesday, with performances at 10 a.m., noon and 2 p.m.
Beginning on Oct. 11, audiences will meet Dr. Thomas Jaggar, portrayed by Dick Hershberger, and find out what drew him to the edge of Kīlauea to study volcanoes. Dr. Jaggar founded the first geologic observatory dedicated to saving lives and co-founded the park itself.
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Guests will meet at Kīlauea’s Visitor’s Center and be escorted to the Whitney Vault, a 16-by-18-foot underground laboratory that still has original seismographic equipment.
Visitors experience April 13, 1912. The interpreters recognize the visitors as having come a long way by ship, train, horse and carriage.
This is first-person living history, re-enacting a time when women did not have the vote, when there were only four airplanes in America and when Teddy Roosevelt was running for president.
The presentation has been seen by thousands of visitors.
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Hershberger is a playwright-director-actor-entertainer best known for his long-running and critically acclaimed one-man living history presentation as Jaggar.
The performance is free, but park entrance fees apply. Donations are gratefully accepted.
In 2005, KDEN, working with the Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, established the KDEN Living History program, providing a historical glimpse into the life of one of the most important figures in the development in the area.
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KDEN received a contract to initiate a pilot program centering around the Whitney Vault.
Jaggar was the son of an Episcopal Bishop born in Philadelphia. In 1897, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1906, he became head of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department of geology.
He traveled to Hawai‘i in 1909 at his own expense, and determined that Kīlauea was to be the home of the first American volcano observatory.
He would work on that project the rest of his life.
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