My Hawaiian Sojourn

Celia - 1950 - Waikiki

We moved to Hawaii in 1949 because of Dad's job, he was a fisheries biologist and he was spending quite a bit of time in what I think of as the South Seas working on something having to do with the tuna fishery there. Eventually I went back to school. My early schooling was spotty due to asthma and moving around. I skipped kindergarten, started the first grade in Seattle, moved to Portland, Oregon and in with Grandma Grace and her cat. I continued first grade spottily that winter in between cat dander related asthma attacks.

In March, right before my 7th birthday, we took the midnight Pan American flight out of Portland to Honolulu. I think it was on a DC4. Two things stuck with me after all these years. It was bitterly cold on the plane; too cold to sleep much. The stewardess covered my younger sister and I with army green wool blankets and kept bringing us hot chocolate. The other was the sight of the magnificent sunrise over the Pacific Ocean with not a speck of land in sight. I've never seen a sunrise to match it. We arrived at 8am, went to our motel with a kitchen. There was a severe housing shortage there after the WW2 and the Korean War was heating up. We managed to lived in four places in our two years there, each a little better than the last. That first day, after a nap Mom, my sister, and I went to the beach and were promptly fried into fritters. We girls had to stay inside in our underpants for several days.

I didn't return to school until the fall of 1949 and went into the 2nd grade. I had been sort of home schooled through the rest of the first grade. School was very rough, besides my kintergarten age sister, there was only one other white kid in my grade. The first month or so I was tormented, beaten up, and chased home by assorted little dears. And that dear bloggers is where I learned to fight. My mother who was shy, homesick, and afraid of everything was not much help. When Dad was in from his sea travels for a bit he taught me how to defend myself, since being skinny and asthmatic made it difficult to run away. I will keep his suggestions to myself except to say they worked, and I did not pass them on to my children, who were better watched over than my sister and I. We also had a mean teacher but she was an equal opportunity mean teacher and humilated everyone on a regular basis. However, punishment for poor behavior in class was to be sent outside onto the covered veranda of the school with your nap mat. That made me laugh even then, being forced to daydream in the lovely sunshine and catch the occasional gecko that paused too long within my reach.

The picture is of me in our last home there, a two bedroom cottage. Last time I heard, about five years ago, those cottages were still there but were now surrounded by high rises.