Born in 1940, Tony Apilado grew up in Hawai'i as one of nine children. Tony's mom raised the kids while his father worked on the sugar plantations in Wahiawa.

Tony moved to New York City as a young adult. Until the late 1980s, he worked as an art director at NY ad agencies.

Tony came back to Honolulu in 1988 and with his credentials landed a plum job at a big deal ad agency. He soon discovered that the advertising scene in Honolulu was not quite the same as in NYC.

In short, the two 'products' his clients sold in Hawai'i were hotels and macadamia nuts. The only images his clients wanted to see, over and over again, were typical man/woman 'romance' shots in Waikiki or of a de-peopled 'nature'.

Bored, Tony quit after three years and started working for a crisis shelter with a branch in Waikiki.

Ironically, some of his clients might have found themselves at the crisis shelter because of ads like those that Tony worked on earlier in his life.

Ads selling an image of a hospitable climate and bountiful resources were aimed at filling up hotel rooms. But many were led to believe that one could be lulled to sleep by the fragrant breeze under Waikiki palm trees after a free meal of fish and coconuts served up by scantily clad maidens.

So when certain US states on the continent connived to get people off their welfare rolls by buying one-way tickets to Hawai'i for impoverished people, there were no shortage of takers.

What the ads didn't show, of course, was that it is illegal to sleep on the beaches in Hawai'i, that the fishing ground in Waikiki was destroyed long ago by 'development' and that Hawaii's cost of living is amongst the highest in the US.

Forced into the growing ranks of homeless people in Waikiki, some of these people met Tony as a crisis shelter counselor.