RECOLLECTIONS OF YESTERYEAR [1931–2012]

1931 (two years old). From Kaua'i my mother and I sailed to Honolulu on the SS Waialeale to see my grandmother who was very ill. I recall seeing my grandmother lying in her bed; her wrinkled face and hands frightened me.

1931(two years old). While in Honolulu, we visited my aunt Rose, my mother's sister, who took care of me for almost a year after I was born. I remember being bored listening to the two women talking, so I asked my mother if I could go outside. Sitting on the top step of the front porch, I watched mynah birds in the trees and on the ground. This was much more interesting than listening to two ladies chatting.

1933 (4½ years old). While my parents were vacationing on the mainland and seeing the World's Fair in Chicago, I stayed with my aunt Angela, my father's sister, who lived in Waimea Valley on Kaua'i, not too far from the Menehune Ditch. My cousin, Allen Gouveia, took a liking to me. He let me sit on his lap so he could teach me how to play his guitar. Because my fingers were too small to reach across the neck of the guitar, he fingered the chords while I strummed.

Allen created a toy telephone for me by stretching one hundred feet of copper wire and attaching tin cans at each end. One can was on the porch of the house; the other can was on a hook nailed to a mango tree four feet off the ground, just high enough for me to grasp it so we could have a "telephone" conversation. He also made a "crystal" radio hooked to earphones and let me listen to people talking to each other. He never did this for his younger brother, Kenneth, who was a year older than me.

Allen made a boat by attaching two corrugated tin roofing slabs to a wooden stick on one end that became the bow and a thin flat board on the other end as the stern of the craft. He gathered road rocks that had tar on them and heated the rocks until the tar melted to produce enough of a gooey, sticky substance. This was his sealant for the boat. He used his boat to cross the Waimea River about 175 feet from one shore to the other. The river was just fifty yards from the house. Allen spent a lot of time with me that summer letting me stir the sticky tar into a gooey mess, explaining how and why my telephone worked, and teaching me songs a TA-year-old might like. Allen was nine years old.

Before leaving Hawai'i, my father purchased a new automobile that he would pick up in Detroit, drive to San Francisco, and then ship to Kaua'i. Unlike today's vehicles, this car had no trunk, but it did have a metal grill that could be pulled down so suitcases or other gear could be attached to it.

1934 (five years old). I watched a bumblebee f lying in and out of a hole in a wood fence along the front yard of our house in Kekaha. Was this my first lesson in the field of entomology?

1935 (six years old). While visiting the Thurston family in Honolulu, Uncle Paul Thurston took Charlie (my cousin) and me to Pearl Harbor to see the Pan American Clipper arriving on its history-making inaugural f light. This flight originated from Alameda, California, on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. guided by a radio beacon from Mokapu Point, located at Kane'ohe Naval Air Station. Passengers sleeping in their individual cabins (like a Pullman roomette on a train) were awakened so they could view Maui and the Moloka'i shoreline before arriving in Honolulu at 9:00 a.m. Thursday. After an overnight visit to O'ahu, this journey continued northwest toward Kaua'i and Ni'ihau before landing in a lagoon at Midway Atoll nine hours later. After another overnight stop, the flight was off to Wake Island, Guam, and its final destination, Manila Bay, Philippine Islands. At approximately two hundred miles per hour, this flight logged more than thirty hours of flying time.

1935 (six years old). I started first grade at Kekaha Elementary School in September and completed second grade in June 1936.

1938 (nine years old). I went to fourth grade at Lincoln Elementary School in Honolulu.

1939 (ten years old). My first airplane ride was from Honolulu to Kaua'i on an Inter-Island Airways (Hawaiian Airlines) nineteen-passenger Sikorsky S-43 seaplane. The flight from John Rogers Airport (Honolulu International) to Port Allen, Kaua'i, a distance of approximately 130 miles, took one hour.

1940 (eleven years old). The new campus for students entering Kamehameha School for Boys opened on Kapalama Heights in Honolulu. Our class (1946) was the first group to start and complete its education entirely at the new campus.

1941 (eleven years old). On December 7, watching the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field was awesome and spectacular. My booklet Kamehameha Students During World War II is an eyewitness account of the event.

1946 (seventeen). After graduating from Kamehameha, I spent the next school year (1946–47) at Farrington High School to obtain additional math and science credits (second year algebra, trigonometry, and physics) for my high school record.

1947 (eighteen). My first trip to the US mainland was on Matson Navigation's SS Matsonia. We left Honolulu on August 3 and arrived in Los Angeles (Wilmington Harbor) four and half days later. There were 680 passengers when we left Honolulu, most of whom were students heading back to their colleges and universities. Half of them disembarked in Los Angeles. The rest of the passengers, most of them students, continued on to San Francisco for colleges in northern California, Oregon, and Washington. The Matsonia left Los Angeles at 6:00 p.m. the following evening and arrived in San Francisco the next morning at 11:30 a.m.

Because this was an overnight stopover in Los Angeles, four of us took a commuter train from Wilmington Harbor to downtown Los Angeles and stayed at a small hotel on Fourth Street called The Alexander. We returned to the ship...