Remember Bozo the Clown? I do. We had an old phonograph that we'd haul out occasionally. It was one of those that required winding with a crank and played only 78 rpm records. I had a couple of Bozo the Clown story albums. "Bozo on the Farm." "Bozo at the Circus." Like that.

Anyway, I had this memorized and could recite the entire record and turn the pages in the dark. But of course, you just had to wait for Bozo to make that right sound that meant "turn the page."

My favorite was Bozo on the Farm. The "turn page" signal was the sound of the klaxon traffic horn on Bozo's flivver (jalopy Model-T car). There's this one part where Bozo finds a bullfrog sitting on a lily pad and asks the frog if he can sing. "Sku! Ah skan sking!" the frog would croak, launching into a glumpity-glump bullfrog rendition that never failed to crack me up.

When I was in college, we used to have a singing group and whenever I'd mention that fact to someone, they'd invariably ask "Can you sing?" and it took every bit of self-control I had not to answer, "Sku, Ah skan sking!"

"Can you sing?" Dumb question.

Anyway it was fun, especially when the phonograph spring would run down and the voices got lower and slower and even lower and even slower. And if it got that way during the bullfrog segment, I'd consider it a special bonus.

Boy, I loved that record.

Lanai Pond was right across the street. Actually, "pond" is a misnomer. Lanai Pond was big -- more like a lake. It was a kind of swampy place with lots of big fish in it, crowded with reeds and limu.

I took my first rowboat ride on the pond. I think we paid a quarter for the ride. The skilled boatman took a couple of us kids out on the pond and even let us row the boat. Kind of spooky. Every time I looked over the side my sphincter would tighten. It wasn't bad when I was rowing; I had to concentrate on not losing the oars. But eventually, I had to move out of the rowing seat and to the stern of the boat.

The boat would rock gently from side to side, we'd squiggle to maintain our balance, and the boat would begin to rock less gently from side to side. I'd inadvertently look over the side, and my sphincter would tighten.

"Look at the fish!" the boatman would say, pointing down at some large mullet passing by under the boat. I'd look, of course, bracing myself for another sphincter-tightening episode. But God, those fish were fascinating. They were mostly mullet, but every now and then a different-colored one would pass by.

I think the quarter bought us a half-hour, but it seemed like only five minutes before we headed back to shore. End of nature lesson.

The canec mill was across the pond from the Kilauea Avenue side, and we used to sit in the grass watching the smoke rise from the stack.

One day, something more than smoke rose from the plant. "The canec plant is burning!" people were shouting as they raced down Barenaba Street to Lanai Pond. My first fire watch. The canec plant really was burning. The flames were reaching high up into the blue Hilo sky, and you could actually hear the roar as the sound blasted across the quarter-mile-wide pond.

I think the entire population of Barenaba Street was at the pond that day as the fire department battled the fire. The canec plant went back into operation after the fire damage was fixed.

The plant itself was a fascination. Years later, when I was in intermediate school, I went skinny dipping at night at the canec plant. The water was fed by springs and was more or less brackish since the pond fed Wailoa River in the Waiakea area of Hilo.

Let me tell you, when we jumped into the night-cold water at the canec plant, more than just sphincters tightened up. Females may have a hard time understanding that, but every boy or man who has ever turned on the cold water in a shower by mistake knows what I'm talking about. It was cold.

Do you know I saw my first insect zapper at Lanai Pond? There was a restaurant that opened at the pond called -- what else? -- The Lanai.

One of its features was an electrical bug zapper. We used to stand there and watch bugs get the shock of their lives and drop into the pond where the hungry fish would gobble them up.

Yumm, fried moth.

I went to the hospital for the first time while we were living at Obachan's house. Had bronchitis and had to stay at Hilo Memorial for a couple of days. Actually, I felt fine and didn't know why I had to sleep in this big room with a whole lot of sick kids. In fact, I don't remember feeling sick at all BEFORE going to the hospital.

Rather inconsequential, that hospital episode was. I could have stayed a day, or a week . . . I just don't remember.

There are other memories connected with the hospital. On one of Dad's emergency calls, I had to wait for him in the car while he attended a kid who had cut the tip of his finger off and was waiting in the emergency room.

Gross. I peeked through the window and saw the tip of the severed finger. Yellow bone, red flesh . . . yecch. Actually felt faint. And later, a bandaged finger and a sobbing boy, a somewhat relieved father. I wonder who the kid was, and what he's doing today?

Dad was a doctor. You already know that. It was okay. The family always got a lot of respect, and we got a lot of kids named after us. But there was a down side. First of all, we could never fake sickness just to stay out of school. Dad knew all the tricks. Worst of all, Dad always had a supply of those dreaded hypodermic injections waiting in his ever-present black bag.

Our booster shots were always up-to-date without fail. One good thing was we never had to leave the house and torture ourselves in a doctor's crowded waiting room, endlessly waiting for the inevitable words: "This won't hurt a bit."

I remember sitting down many times at the kitchen table at Obachan's house and being presented with some options:

"You're feeling sick? I'm going to have to give you an injection!" I went to school.

"You better listen to your mom, or I'm going to give you an injection!" I listened to Mom.

"You better eat your liver, or I'm going to give you an injection!" I ate my liver (but I hate it to this day).

"You better stop teasing your sister, or I'm going to give you two injections!" I was an angel.

You get the idea.

There's a bridge across the mouth of the Wailuku River that we called the "airplane bridge." After the tidal wave of 1946 devastated the existing bridge, a new bridge was erected. The difference was the new bridge had a surface like a metal grating so that if there ever were another tidal wave of such magnitude, the water would pass through and not take the bridge down.

It must work because the bridge is still standing today. Of course, no tidal wave has hit the downtown Hilo area near the Wailuku River with the force and destruction of the 1946 wave.

The bridge always was kind of spooky. Whenever the car would cross the bridge, it would kind of shimmy almost imperceptibly from side to side. I always felt we were going to skid right off and into the ocean.

The bad part of the experience was that you knew you had to cross the bridge again when you came back to Hilo town.

And the noise! What a noise! It sounded like . . . well, like the propellers of an airplane -- like the DC-3s that used to fly between the islands. Bz-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z. I remember slouching down in the car seat, not wanting to look out the window, afraid of the sound, squeezing because of the shimmy, wondering when the traverse was going to end.

We occasionally played touch football on Barenaba Street right in front of Obachan's house, with all the neighborhood kids running up and down the street. Of course, I was one of the smallest, so I don't think I ever got thrown a pass.

We used to argue about who was going to be on the "Rams," and who was going to be on the "Forty-Niners." The team names didn't mean a thing to me then, but I did catch players' names like "Crazy Legs" and "Night Train."

There was a neighborhood dog named "Jimmy" that used to come around. Friendliest dog-gone dog there was. All the kids knew him, and all the kids enjoyed petting and playing with him. I think he belonged to the Tanigawa family that ran the Tanigawa Store (best manju in Hilo).

Jimmy used to join the football games, trying to steal the ball. Many times you'd see a bunch of kids running down the street chasing a dog that was salivating freely on the football in his mouth.

Sad ending. Jimmy got sick. His face got all bloated and the kids didn't want to pet him any more. He got sicker and eventually died. I wonder now if his heart weren't broken as well, and if he died thinking the kids he loved no longer loved him. He was buried in the Tanigawa's yard.

Did I tell you Obachan used to tell me stories? She told me all those famous Japanese folk tales. There were quite a few, but the one that I remember most was "Momotaro, The Peach Boy." Great story! Especially the part where he fights the Oni with his friends (monkey, dog, eagle, and maybe another animal -- memory fails). I remember lying in bed listening to Obachan tell those tales, thinking how great it would be to be Momotaro, to be born from a peach, to have such heroic friends and adventures, and to fearlessly defeat the evil devils.

And then Mom would also tell me stories. She told me those neat children's stories, and used to recite Eugene Field poetry. I especially remembered and loved "Peter Rabbit" and "Winken, Blinken and Nod."

Mom says she used to take me shopping with her and that I'd recite "Winken, Blinken and Nod" to anyone in the store who would listen. Wow. How embarrassing to find out later in life that I was strange enough to actually do that.

I really enjoyed the stories. They were great. Later on, when I became a dad, I made it a point to read to my two sons. Especially during Christmas. We always had a tradition of reading a whole bunch of stories on Christmas Eve -- "The Night Before Christmas," "Babar Meets Father Christmas," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," and stories like that.

Remember now, those were the days when we didn't have television. Radio was the only mass electronic medium available, and no one could afford to go to movies every night. So story-telling (or story-listening) was a significant part of our lives.

I don't have many memories of my great-grandmother (Obachan's mother). In fact, the only recollections I have are her being bed-ridden in the small room adjoining the kitchen at Obachan's house, and that she wore diapers.

The room itself has an unpleasant memory, for it was there that I got my first and only "yellow jacket" (actually, paper wasp) sting. I was looking out the window and leaned my elbow against the sill. Waiting for me there was a paper wasp. When I leaned against it, it stung me. Hurt like hell, too.

I've had honeybee stings that hurt, but they were nothing like that wasp sting. I think it was saving up its poison especially for me. Obachan put some bluing on it and said it would be okay. So I walked around with a blue elbow for a day.

A few years later, when we had moved to Kaumana and I used to spend the weekends at Obachan's house, a friend of mine -- Walter Janado -- showed me how to take wasp grubs out of the paper nest, fry them in shoyu and butter, and eat them. Tell you the truth, I never ate one, but they sure looked yummy when Walter popped them in his mouth.

This is turning into a bee story. Dad once told me that they used to eat the grubs when they were attending the University of Hawaii. You've seen pictures of college students swallowing live goldfish in the '50s? Well, the UH campus craze was the swallowing of wasp grubs. Live, squirmy, yecchy wasp grubs.

The neighborhood kids used to look for carpenter bee drones. Carpenter bees are those huge, round black bees that bore holes in wood to lay their eggs and raise their families.

The drones were males, and they were golden-colored -- quite pretty, in fact. The kids used to catch them (they don't sting), tie one end of a long thread around the bee's waist, and the other end to a button on their shirt. The bees would fly around and around their heads as they walked down the street.

Personally, I never had the nerve to do something like that.

Sister Dale (now Dayle) was born while we lived at Obachan's house. The day after Dayle was born, Dad took me to the hospital so I could wave to Mom as she poked her head out the window. It became a sort of tradition. I remember waving to her three more times in the future, after Audrey, Eric, and Karen were born.