Kam Fong Chun
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Kam Fong Chun (May 27, 1918–October 18, 2002) was born Kam Tong Chun in the Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawaii. He was an American actor whose claim to fame was his 1968 to 1978 star performance as Chin Ho Kelly, a police detective on the CBS television network series Hawaii Five-O.
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[edit] Biography
Kam Fong Chun was a 1938 graduate of President William McKinley High School. He worked at Pearl Harbor Shipyard in his 20s as a boiler maker and was a witness to the attack by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. After the death of his first wife and two eldest children in 1944, he applied for a job as a police officer at the Honolulu Police Department. He served on there for sixteen years. After his retirement from the police force he worked as a disc jockey and sold real estate in addition to doing community theater.
Chun's life was filled with tragedies. His father had an affair, which led to his parents divorce and the splitting of the family. The two oldest children went with his father and the younger five, including 7-year-old Chun, went to live with his mother. The affair also led to Chun's father being kicked out of the family business by his paternal grandfather, which left the family in poverty. [1] His brother burned to death as he was painting the family home and someone had lit a match. Chun watched as his brother died. On June 8, 1944, Chun lost his family in a freak air disaster that devastated their home in Honolulu. Two B-24 bombers collided over the Chun residence, killing wife Esther, four-year old daughter Marilyn and two-year old son Donald. Chun recalled in an interview, "Everything came crashing down, barely missing Kalakaua School. My wife and children were killed. I lost my family in five minutes. All I wanted to do was die."
Chun later remarried Gladys Lindo in 1949. They had two sons, Dennis and Dickson, and daughters, Brenda and Valerie.
[edit] Stage name
Chun's stage name came from a misunderstanding of his first name of his first teacher who taught him to write Kam Fong Chun instead of his birthname, Kam Tong Chun. Due to confusion as he got older, he later legalized his name to the former. CBS asked him to shorten his name to Kam Fong when he was hired for Hawaii Five-O.
[edit] The 1997 Shot at a Five-O revival and Kam Fong
Talk had centered around a remake or a feature film version of the show for years. In 1997, CBS and Stephen J. Cannell (The Rockford Files, Baretta, The Commish) collaborated on a pilot for a possible new Five-O series. The pilot would introduce some of the new cast and feature former regulars from the original series, including Fong. According to Five-O fan and author of a book on the show, Karen Rhodes, Fong was asked to reprise his role and appear in the pilot. Neither Fong nor any of the other regulars told Cannell that Chin Ho had been killed off at the end of the tenth season. This was only discovered after all of Fong's scenes had been shot and to excise him from the project would have caused delays and overruns in cost. Hoping that CBS executives would not remember the one episode out of hundreds, Cannell screened the pilot.
