rick and marcie carroll

About Rick & Marcie Carroll

Rick and Marcie Carroll were both working for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1983, when she spotted a bulletin board notice announcing Asian Studies journalism fellowships at University of Hawai‘i and applied. Fortune smiled, and they bought one-way tickets to Honolulu. She went to class and stumbled through beginning Japanese. He sailed and windsurfed until the money ran out, then joined the daily morning newspaper. When the school year ended, after a month-long study trip to Japan, it was too late to go home to San Francisco; they were already hopelessly in love with Hawai‘i and the Pacific. They shared a flair for great assignments and knew a good story when they saw one. Honolulu Advertiser editors sent him to Manila and the pirate-infested Southern Philippines with volunteer surgeons on a risky medical mission. His illustrated series, “Surgeons of the Sulu Sea,” won a National Headliner’s Award. His prize-winning reports from such exotic datelines as Nuku‘Alofa, Huahine, Tawi Tawi, and Rapa Nui have appeared in newspapers around the world. He has interviewed the Sultan of Sulu, the King of Tonga, the former Premier of China, three governors of Hawai‘i, and Imelda Marcos. She went to work for a local magazine, Discover Hawai‘i, and traveled extensively throughout the Islands to write about people, destinations, and the travel industry, the engine that runs Hawai‘i’s economy. She joined the Hawai‘i Visitors Bureau as director of communications and created prize-winning publications. She worked with writers and broadcasters from around the world in pursuit of Hawai‘i stories. Her duties took her to Japan, Singapore, and Australia on marketing missions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they both became freelance travel writers, working from their Windward O‘ahu home, reporting on Hawai‘i and the Pacific for United Press International and a variety of publications. Author of Madame Pele: True Encounters with Hawai‘i’s Fire Goddess and six Hawai‘i guidebooks, his Great Outdoor Adventures of Hawai‘i, was the first eco-adventure guide to the Islands and inspired an award-winning column that ran five years in Aloha: The Magazine of Hawaii & The Pacific. His Hawaii adventure stories have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, Outside, and Forbes FYI. His anthology, Chicken Skin True Spooky Stories of Hawai‘i, became one of Hawai‘i’s best sellers along with five sequels of Hawai‘i’s Best Spooky Tales. This series brought 200 new local authors to print. Marcie Rasmussen Carroll was born in New Orleans and grew up in the South and the Midwest before her family moved to Maryland. She graduated from Bucknell University and earned a master’s in journalism from Stanford University, where she won a reporting fellowship some years later. She started reportage on the women’s pages of the San Jose Mercury, moved to Atlanta to work for United Press International covering primarily politics, moved back to the Bay Area and the Mercury News to cover city hall, wandered south to theMonterey Herald to cover environmental and energy news, joined the Chronicle and wrote about energy, science, suburbs, and politics before becoming the “plague editor” (assistant city editor in charge of politics, law, and government coverage). Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Rick Carroll, son of a World War II pilot, grew up in Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Texas, California, and Japan. He first sailed across the Pacific when he was fourteen (and survived a typhoon at sea). His first newspaper job was at the Okinawa Morning Star. He returned to California in time for the ’60s, studied journalism at San Jose State University, and wrote for the San Jose Mercury News before joining the San Francisco Chronicle. The Carrolls live in a nearly 300-year-old seaport on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and Ka‘a‘a‘wa, ancestral landing site of early Polynesian voyagers.