West Hawaii Today has this report. Excerpts:

Helene Hale, whose political career started before Hawaii’s statehood and who, as chairman of the county Board of Supervisors in the 1960s, was the first woman mayor in the state, died of natural causes Friday night at her Hilo home. She was 94.

“Helene Hale was special,” former Mayor Harry Kim said Saturday. “She was there for the people of Hawaii Island and for what was right in her mind, and she was unafraid to confront anything she thought was wrong.”

Hale, who was born Helene Eleanor Hilyer on March 23, 1918, in Minneapolis, graduated from the University of Minnesota, where her grandfather had been the first African-American to graduate. Her uncle was Ralph Bunche, the political scientist, academic and diplomat, who in 1950 became the first person of color to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. …