You're probably wondering what "B.R." stands for. Very simply, it stands for "Before Riverside." Those are the days before I entered Riverside School as a first-grader in 1950.
The B.R. days were like most others throughout the country as the World War II veterans came home to take up, to continue, their lives in an abnormally peaceful world. In '47, we stepped off the DC-6 at Hilo Airport to take up permanent residence in Dad's home town.
We lived at 26 Barenaba Street, which in the years to come would affectionately become known as "Obachan's House." Situated in the Kilauea area of Hilo, the house was located behind Yogi Store, which itself was across the street (Kilauea Avenue) from Lanai Pond.
Actual memories of the B.R. days are scant indeed. The two to five-year-old mind is not acutely attuned to consciously storing details. They're there buried somewhere in the subconscious, but it seems the sole purpose of the pre-schooler is merely to survive the daily onslaught of new information that helps formulate the basis of learning.
Many of the physical characteristics of the neighborhood remain etched in my memory, but because physical change comes so slowly when one is living with them, the neighborhood never seemed to change when we lived there. Our home was a two-story wood-frame house, white with green trim and a green roof. The living quarters were small -- a modest living room, two small bedrooms, a bathroom with no bath, and a small kitchen. That was the upstairs.
Our bathtub was downstairs. It was a furo, a wooden bathtub about four feet long by three feet wide by three feet tall, typical of the Japanese baths prevalent in Hawaii's homes at the time. We'd fill the tub with hot water through a hose coming from the washing sink tap. We'd take a pan full of hot water from the furo, pour it over ourselves, then lather up. Scrub, scrub. More hot water to rinse off, then we'd gingerly step into the hot tub for a leisurely soak. Eventually, we put a shower in, but in those B.R. days, the furo was our bath.
The downstairs was the household work area. There was a dark and spooky tool closet with a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. I used to think that room was where the bogeyman and ooky creatures lived. The ironing was done downstairs and wires were strung along its length so clothes could be hung there to dry when it was raining. And believe me, in Hilo it always seemed to be raining.
A carpentry work area was situated along one of the downstairs walls. Actually, "walls" is not entirely correct. The downstairs area was surrounded by four-inch side boards with about two inches space between the boards. It made for a sunnier and airier downstairs.
Dominating the middle of the downstairs area was a room constructed to store stuff. I don't know what all went into that room. Stuff, I guess. It wasn't very large (it looked smaller and smaller as I grew older). Its walls were made of canec (a sort of bulletin board material made from the refuse of sugar cane fiber after the juices had been extracted). It always remained kind of a mystery.
The house occupied a corner in a right-angle bend of Barenaba Street. We had a backyard of sorts. It wasn't really a backyard, just an area full of rocks and gravel with some grass poking through here and there. The outside clothesline took up most of the space, but I guess the most interesting thing about the back area was the cesspool that lurked below the surface.
There was a small hole (about three-quarters of an inch in diameter) where the cement floor of the downstairs met the cement rise of the house's foundation. This was the dreaded "cesspool hole" (actually, it was a drainage that led directly into the cesspool). God only knows what crawled around in this hole.
One day I saw something I'll never forget. I was taking a bath, gloriously enjoying the soak, pretending I was a Navy frogman. I was dunking my head under the water and (ahem) making "nature bubbles" when I just happened to glance at the cesspool hole. Something . . . ye gods . . . something was moving in the hole. It looked like two wires testing the air. A shiny thing surreptitiously peered out, then zipped back into the hold. It did it again! And again!
Mesmerized by this strange phenomenon, I forgot about blowing up U-boats with "nature bubbles" and stared intently at the hole. And then slowly, ever so slowly, a gigantic cockroach of a size as yet unmatched made a permanent impression in my preschool brain as it crawled boldly out of the cesspool hole. As if it owned the world, it started toward me. I feel sorry for those who bathed after me. I confess. After all these years, I confess. I increased the volume of the tub water by a couple of ounces. I ducked behind the edge of the tub!
Gathering my courage, I peered over the rim, only to discover that the roach was gone. But where had it gone? Did it return to the cesspool? Did it run under the washing machine? Or had it crawled up the side of the furo? I didn't wait to find out. End of bath. To this day, I still can't stand the dirty buggers.
We did have a small yard on the other side of the house with plants along its edges and plumeria trees spreading their glossy leaves and permeating the air with their pungent perfume whenever the flowers bloomed.
There also was a garage for Dad's LaSalle, which he had brought back with us from the mainland. Another little structure held the lawn tools, a sort of fireplace where Obachan used to boil stuff (I swear it looked like clothes in rice water) in a caldron, and other paraphernalia which accumulated through the years.
Getting back to Dad's LaSalle, I remember him telling me a little story about the car. He had bought it on the mainland and after shipping it back to Hawaii, had been informed by the state tax office that he had to pay the state gross excise tax on the car. Being a well-educated and respected man who had just survived World War II, Dad called up the bureaucrat and proceeded to give him what for. I recall Dad telling me the conversation went something like this: "How can you charge me tax on a car that I didn't buy in Hawaii, and for which I already had paid a sales tax on the mainland? And how can you charge me a penalty for the late payment?" he asked. "I'm sorry, but that's the law," said the taxman. "But I didn't know there was such a law," Dad retorted. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," was the blunt reply. "Send the money."
Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Dad never forgot that and he made sure I never forgot that either. I think more than anything else, it rankled him that he had been caught with his guard down. That, and the fact that he had to pay sales tax twice for his car. (Same thing happened to me in 1972 when I came back to Hawaii with my family to live. Got a bill from the state. But poke their eye! I had my car receipt that showed I had paid the tax for our orange Datsun in California, and that was enough evidence for them. They backed off. Score one for Dad.)
The LaSalle met a violent death. Unfortunately, the electrical system short-circuited on the way back from a hospital call sometime in the mid-50s and the resulting fire ensured that the car was a total loss. One can only hope that the car next to it belonged to the bureaucrat tax-collector.
J. AKUHEAD PUPULE
Hal Lewis was better known as J. Akuhead Pupule ("Aku" for short) when he was alive. Back in the B.R. days, I remember his coming to Hilo and putting on a show. I think it was at Hilo Airport. It's a little hazy but I do recall a man standing by us who had only one thing to say about Aku: "Boy, is he ugly!"
I mention Aku for only one reason. He used to have a kiddie program on the radio that served as a sort of afternoon "story time" for us kids. Many was the time that I broke off from the football game in the street (but we HAD to play in the street, there was nowhere else, and we didn't have television) to rush into the house and listen to Aku's story.
Sometimes, I forgot. Those days were simply ruined.
The stories themselves turned out to be inconsequential. I don't remember a single one. The thing that stuck with me throughout the years was his traditional sign-off. Aku used to say: "If you no can say nothing nice about somebody, then no say nothing at all." Good advice, and strongly reinforced by many others as the years passed. I still try to follow his advice.
A BAD SENSE OF DIRECTION
I once got lost. This happened after Sunday school when I decided to go along with a friend to his parent's store, just down the street from the Church of the Holy Cross. The church was located on Kinoole Street next to Lincoln Park. They've since moved the church following a fund-raising effort to build a new one. This took place during my junior high days, but we'll cover it later on.
Glenn Miyao and I had cut across Lincoln Park to Kilauea Avenue and had begun our adventurous preschool Sunday escapade. All of a sudden — and I don't really know how it happened, Glenn had disappeared, his family's store was nowhere in sight. For the life of me, I didn't know where I was.
Of course, I cried and cried until someone took me into a store and calmed me down. After I told them who my parents were and what my phone number was, they called my parents. Dad miraculously and heroically arrived to swoop me into his arms and take me home. (By the way, I do remember my old telephone number. These were the days when telephone numbers in Hilo were four or five digits. Ours was 4758. My Dad's office was 51748.)
In retrospect, I wasn't very far from the church, just about a block or so away, but to a little kid in unfamiliar surroundings, even a mere half block or less is forever. I can only surmise that Dad had gone home after Sunday service worried sick about me (not to mention Mom).
When we got home, there was Mom, ready to console me and take me into her arms. You just don't know how much you love your parents until you see them after being lost. I'm sure I gave them ample opportunity in the years that followed to worry about me, but if nothing else, I made sure I never got lost again.
GLOBAL DISASTER?
I used to have this little globe of the earth that showed the world and political divisions as it existed in the early 50s. I guess there were countries like Bechuanaland Protectorate, French Somaliland, Ceylon and Indo-China on it. Those names don't exist anymore. They sort of went the way of my youth. Bechuanaland became Botswana, French Somaliland became Afars and Issas, Ceylon became Sri Lanka, and Indo-China became Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
Anyway, the thing I remember about this globe was that one day Dad really put a scare into me. He placed the globe in the middle of the kitchen table and said he was going to make a dark cloud appear over our house. Dad located the Hawaiian Islands and slowly began to pass his hand over the globe.
Slowly, slowly, his hand neared Hawaii. A second later, it covered Hawaii. A second later, it got dark outside. For only a moment, but it did get darker outside as a cloud actually passed over the house. Shook me up. Today I wonder if it shook up Dad too. Maybe he didn't know he had the power!
Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z
Back in the '50s, when I was in the Kapiolani School kindergarten (they now call it "Chiefess Kapiolani School"), we always had to take a nap after lunch. Actually, this practice continued all the way up to the fifth grade, even in the Riverside days. All of us kids would bring denim sleeping bags to school. I always felt out of place. Like the other kids' bags, mine was blue denim. Except that with my bag, the head rest was white. Nobody else had blue and white sleeping bags so I always felt a little self-conscious about mine.
You know, I never was much of a nap-taker, much to the chagrin of my teachers. Many's the time when I've felt the sting of a ruler at the very instant that a resounding thwack echoed through the classroom. Apparently Miss Maureen Riley, my kindergarten teacher, felt it necessary to let my parents know, for one day Mom gave me a set of denim sleeping shades to take to school. If you want to know the truth, I felt kind of silly about the whole thing. But never argue with your mom, you can't win. Come nap time, Miss Riley asked if I had my sleeping shades. "Of course!" I replied (I was kind of sassy), and showed her Mom's handiwork. "Good," she said, gently placing them over my eyes.
The next thing I knew, I got up and took off the sleeping shades. How stupid, I was thinking, it didn't work at all. Goes to show you how much I know. The rest of the class was sitting around the teacher listening to a story. I actually had fallen asleep with the help of the sleeping shades. I mean, I really fell asleep! Nap time had come and gone, the rest of the class had gotten up, put away their stuff and had gone about with the classroom routine. According to Miss Riley, when I fell asleep it seemed too good to be true, she just couldn't bear to wake me up.
I gave Miss Riley some handkerchiefs for Christmas that year. Just another reason for me to feel a little out of place. I don't think anyone else gave her anything for Christmas. But then, Mom was like that, always thinking of the teacher.
Kapiolani School was just a hop, skip and jump from our house and I used to walk to school everyday. Before I started kindergarten, I couldn't wait to start school and go everyday like the big boys did.
I do remember some of the oddest things. For instance, I recall hearing President Harry Truman apologizing to the American people in a radio broadcast in class and thinking, "What's he apologizing for?" I think what he said was that if he had in any way offended anyone during his term as president, he was sorry. Must have been during his re-election campaign.
There was a bomb shelter near the kindergarten that we ached to explore. We never did muster enough nerve to actually venture inside though. It was dark, it was cold, and there were things hanging from the ceiling. And I just knew there were a lot of spiders and cockroaches inside!
STUFF ABOUT DAD
Dad used to take me to the Kapiolani schoolyard every now and then. He'd bring along his golf clubs and take a few practice swings. Wednesday was his half-day off (he'd work Saturday mornings) and he used to go golfing. Never really got a lot of golf in, if I recall, but I did enjoy going along with him and watching him take whacks at the ball.
Dad was quite talented. He could play the harmonica and the violin, he was a center on the Hilo High football team, and class valedictorian. He earned extra money playing music while at the University of Hawaii, and worked in the grapefields during his Tulane University summer vacations.
He could turn his upper eyelids inside out and gross out us kids.
One March -- I think it was when I was in intermediate school -- he began making a show of splashing what he called a magic potion on his balding head (boy, he started balding young, I remember noticing a receding hairline even in his high school pictures). He did this for about two weeks, and on April 1, we awoke to find him with a flaming red wig on, laughing so hard I thought he was going to crack a rib. It was a great way to start off April Fool's Day, and I haven't experienced a better one yet.
Dad had this weird streak in him that sometimes surfaced at the oddest times. He'd been planning this for a couple of months, when he saw an ad for fright wigs in a magazine. He mailed away for one, but they screwed up the order and sent him a red wig instead of black.
It seems as though Mom and Dad always had something on their heads. Dad used to wear a straw hat, sort of a carryover from mainland life. In fact, lots of men in Hilo used to wear hats at the time. And whenever I think of the B.R. days, I always seem to picture Mom with a bandanna or some other covering on her head.
Previous Page | Home Page | Next Page
GUIDE TO THE MIYAMOTO WEBSITES
The Beautiful Tiger In Art | Pithy Mots
Inside Craig's Diamond Head | Craig's Strategic PR Website
Tiramisu: Heaven In Your Mouth
Drop Me A Line
 |
Sign Craig's Hilo Days Guestbook
View Craig's Hilo Days Guestbook |