encouragement of his parents to pursue his interest in drawing, Kāne's most formative experiences in childhood were in Hawaii, where his father and his family passed along the traditional folk tales of the islands. Kāne served in the United States Navy, qualifying for veteran's educational benefits under the G.I. Bill. After he was discharged, he used those benefits to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois, earning a bachelor's degree and, in 1953, a master's degree. Under an arrangement between the two schools at the time, his master's degree was awarded by the University of Chicago. Early career Herb had his own advertising studio on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, which is known as "The Magnificent Mile." He was a very successful designer/illustrator/author. His talents were expansive, working with everything from books and magazines, architectural designs, to commercial television work for Kelloggs and various companies, and more. Kāne said he found advertising work unsatisfying. "The end came when I won a Jolly Green Giant campaign, and for a year, did drawings and paintings of that big green fairy until I could no longer suffer it." Kāne had been sailing a racing catamaran on Lake Michigan, and had begun researching Hawaiian canoes in the library of the University of Chicago and in the Field Museum of Natural History, where in 1961 the museum had installed one of the most extensive collections of artifacts from Pacific Ocean cultures put on view to date. Kāne produced a series of fourteen paintings of Polynesian canoes in the 1960s, which were purchased in 1969 by the Hawaii State Foundation of Culture and the Arts, then headed by its first director, Alfred Preis, architect of the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. Kāne has stated that this purchase made it possible for him to move to Hawaii, where he lived in Honolulu and continued his study of Polynesian voyaging canoes. The Hōkūleʻa and its cultural impact In Honolulu, Kāne attracted a group of sailing enthusiasts, including University of Hawaii anthropologist Ben Finney and Tommy Holmes, author of The Hawaiian Canoe. Together they founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society and began work on the Hōkūleʻa, a voyaging canoe based on historical Polynesian design, capable of sailing between Hawaii and Tahiti. Their purpose was to prove that ancestral Polynesian voyagers could have purposely navigated in vessels of similar type to settle Hawaii. Kāne has