09/10/2026
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Mahalo a nui loa Richard "Buffalo" Keaulana for your Hawaii Soul of Service
His wife says he has pulled more than 10,000 people out of the ocean. He could not read the form that said he was allowed to.
Richard Keaulana was born on Auld Lane in Honolulu on September 2, 1934, and his father died a month later. His mother named him Buffalo, for the water buffalo, because she could never get him out of the sea. When he was ten, his stepfather chased him into a taro patch with a knife, and the boy ran to the ocean and did not go back.
He lived on the sand between Nanakuli and Makaha, and before school he hid a spear in the bushes. "When I went to school, I never had lunch money," he said. "So I would hide my spear, then jump in the ocean, poke a few fish, bring them back to the cafeteria, give them to the lady there and trade the fish for lunch."
"I didn't know how to read or write," he said of those years. "I stuttered. I was one of those 'nothing' guys."
The nothing guy won the bodysurfing title at the Makaha International four times in the 1950s and the surfboard division in 1960.
On November 6, 1960, he married Momi Whaley, and twelve days later the City hired him as the only park keeper at Makaha Beach Park. Rake the sand, clean the bathrooms, and live in the apartment upstairs from the public bathhouse, where they raised their children.
Within his first few days he pulled a baby out of the water, and it never stopped. "People would come to the comfort station, pound on my door upstairs at night, and yell for help," he said. "Please help! My wife is out there." None of it was in the job. For eight years he went anyway, at any hour, for anyone.
One of them was a Texas oilman who wiped out in big surf and was knocked senseless. Buffalo dove, found him on the bottom and brought him up, and the oilman paid for his house. The boy who had slept on the beach got a roof because a stranger had nearly drowned in front of it.
By 1969 the City wanted to make him a lifeguard, but there was a written test and he could not pass it. Mayor Neal Blaisdell signed an exception to the hiring rules, and on February 14, 1969, Makaha Beach got its first full-time lifeguard. He held that sand until August 31, 1994, thirty-four years in all. Momi put the number on it herself: "I'm not exaggerating. Over 10,000 people, he's saved."
In 1976 he steered Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti, and in 1977 he came home and built a surf contest at Makaha with one law. "No stealing for two days," he said. "I wanted the boys to feel what it was like to do something good." Seven finalists that first year and no first place. The trophies were gourds grown from seeds he carried back from Tahiti. Brian Keaulana says his father "turned all the crooks into cops."
If you have stood on Makaha sand on Presidents Day weekend and watched a canoe ride a wave, you were at his party.
On January 17, 2025, three state senators introduced a bill to make September 2, his birthday, Richard "Buffalo" Keaulana Day. Not a holiday, just a day with his name on it. It went to the Senate Committee on Tourism and Culture Affairs on January 23, two resolutions followed in March, and not one of the three was ever given a hearing. The bill died when the session ended in May 2026.
The state he guarded for thirty-four years could not find one afternoon for him. Ten thousand people out of the water, and not one hearing.
Makaha did not wait for a committee. On February 15, 2025, at sunrise, Hōkūleʻa sailed into Makaha for the opening of his contest, the canoe he had steered to Tahiti in 1976 coming to him. He was 90. He went out on a jet ski and circled her once around, with the beach filling behind him. The contest draws more than 3,000 people a year, and they were there.
The 49th Classic ran this February and the 50th is due next February. Three of his grandsons became lifeguards, and one of them, Noland, took a borrowed boat out alone in October 2024 and brought a missing 17-year-old paddler home before dawn, after eleven and a half hours in the dark. "Noland has a good heart," Buffalo said. "He was born to do this."
Buffalo Keaulana turned 92 on Wednesday, and no proclamation came. He is still trading, the way the hungry boy traded fish for lunch: a spear for a rescue tube, a rescue tube for a contest, a contest for a whole coast. The ʻohana that began with one boy sleeping alone on the sand now covers Makaha two weekends every February. Hawaii has not given Buffalo Keaulana his day. Makaha gives him one every year.
