The summer of '61 was also when I held down my first paying job -- as a bag boy/stock boy/dairy-case cleaner/utility boy at Pick And Pay Supermarket. Pick And Pay was in temporary quarters at the corner of Kekuanaoa and Kilauea. The supermarket had been displaced when the great tidal wave flattened its previous premises.

The parking area was unpaved and full of rocks, so we couldn't roll the filled bags out in shopping carts. Instead, we put them in cardboard boxes, hefted them onto our shoulders, and stumbled to the customers' cars.

Mike Masutani was my mentor at the market. He was a senior who had been working there for quite a while and knew all the ropes. Every now and then, a customer would take pity on us and offer a tip (usually a dime). Mike would always turn it down politely. He told me that he couldn't accept the tip because he was only doing his job and was getting paid to do it well.

Mike taught me everything there was to know about working at a supermarket -- how to hoist a 100-pound bag of rice onto my shoulders, how to stack the rice so the pile wouldn't topple over, how to wipe the tops of the cans so they wouldn't collect moisture and rust, how to move the old stock to the front and put the new ones in the back, how to sweep the floor so that dust wouldn't fly all around, and how to (barf) clean the dairy case.

That was the worst job in the store. Thank God, we had to clean the out dairy case only once a week, or I would have died from the smell. The case developed this yecchy barf smell from the accumulated water and milk drippings that mixed in.

We had to clean it out using nothing but a rag, a pail of water and our hands. We had to stick our hands into that muck. We had to soak the rags in the muck, and wring them out into an empty bucket, using our hands. I was grateful that we took turns. With Mike, Dennis Makinodan and me doing the work, it meant I only had to clean the case every three weeks or so.

Dennis and I were classmates, and as it turns out, we're calabash relatives. Dennis' grandmother was Obachan's cousin, or something like that. Dennis fooled around a lot more than I did, and if Mike was a steadying influence, then Dennis was his alter-ego. All in all, we made a good team.

That doesn't mean that I didn't do some stupid things, however. I remember one time when I packed the owner's grocery boxes into the back seat of her car. I neglected to look where I put the boxes, and consequently placed them right on top of some record albums she had just bought. Crack. When I found out about it the next day, I immediately went to her and apologized. She was very nice about it, telling me that accidents do happen, please be more careful, and I was lucky because it might have been a customer instead of her. Another lesson of life learned.

The most tiring days were when the rice shipments came in. They came in five, ten, fifty and one-hundred-pound bags. Ten-thousand pounds in all, and we had to unload the truck and carry all that rice into the storeroom. By the time the truck pulled off, our arms and legs were so weak that we had to force ourselves out front to help the customers.

The work was hard, but I liked it. I could have worked there during my senior year as well, but I screwed up.

You see, I took my second summer-school class that year -- physics -- and ended up with the third C of my high school career.

Dad was disappointed. He felt I couldn't handle working and studying at the same time. I thought I could. He said I couldn't. So I sadly quit the job at the end of summer.

As county physician, Dad was called upon to perform various and sundry medical services at the oddest times. For example, whenever there was an accident and a doctor was needed to perform emergency work or to pronounce someone dead, he had to go and check it out.

One day, Dad came home and told us he had just given physical examinations to Peace Corps volunteers based in Waipio Valley. The Peace Corps was an invention of President John F. Kennedy, and their mission was to go to underdeveloped countries, and teach the locals the basics of self-sufficiency -- carpentry, bread-making, crop rotation, and whatever.

Dad was impressed with the young people that were training in Hawaii. And I was most impressed when he told us that the volunteers were not allowed to ride automobiles, or to accept any transportation what-so-ever. On the contrary, they had to walk wherever they went.

That meant that in order for them to get their physicals, they had to walk the 50+ miles to Hilo from Waipio Valley. Dad never mentioned blisters, but I bet he had to treat a few.

In retrospect, my senior year in high school wasn't especially special. When I was an underclassman, I kind of looked up to the juniors and seniors, thinking how mature they looked. But when I became a senior, I never quite measured up to my expectations of how mature I should have looked.

We got into pop dancing a lot. In fact, every Saturday morning, we used to have dance practice in Mrs. Elaine Kono's classroom (nice of her to let us use it on the weekends). About a dozen of us would practice the latest steps as seen on American Bandstand, especially during the weeks before a school dance. I guess it was our dream that when the latest hit records were played, our group would dazzle the rest of the kids with our coolness, and adeptness on the dance floor.

Well, it never happened that way. Everyone would immediately jump up and start dancing the new dance. Everyone knew the steps. Where'd they learn how to dance like that? Well, the answer had to be that other groups had the same idea we had, and were doing the same things we were.

It was around this time that strange dances were appearing almost weekly on the Bandstand. The one I remember most was the Pony — not because it was a great dance, but because every time "Pony Time" by Chubby Checker came on at a dance, the noise was so loud it sounded like the gymnasium was collapsing. Boom, boom, boom, boom, the sound of feet hitting the dance floor. The pony was great because you could dance it to a lot of other songs, such as "The Bristol Stomp" and any other song with a heavy rhythmic beat (just about every other hard rock and roll song that existed).

We learned all kinds of dances -- the cha-cha, locomotion, the fly, twist, and the mashed potatoes, to name just a few.

There also was the time a group of us did the Continental on stage during a school assembly. It would have been a great demonstration, except that one stupid fool turned the wrong way and was facing the audience while everybody else was heading for the back of the stage. Who was it? One guess.

I loved the music of the era. Whenever I was driving, I would turn the music up loud and sing along. It was great. It also was annoying to Dad whenever I used his car. Dad used to tell me not to forget to turn the radio off when I got out of the car. The car radios in those days were not transistorized, and you stood the chance of blowing a tube if you started the car with the radio on. Dad said the sudden flow of electricity could damage the radio and blow a tube.

But of course I always forgot. It was bad enough that I risked damage to the radio, but I also forgot to turn the volume down and Dad would be greeted with eardrum-busting, obnoxious rock and roll music when he turned the key.

It was one of his pet peeves.

We played cards a lot during my senior year. At least once a month, we'd get together at someone's house and play penny-ante poker. I especially liked going to Artie Kimura's house, because his Dad had build a bomb shelter to weather any nukes that Russia might lob our way. (Remember now, that this was during the height of the Cold War, and around the time the U.S. was conducting nuclear tests in the Pacific.)

This is where I learned to play poker — draw, seven-card stud, six-card stud, spit in the ocean, Indian poker, quarterback, small V, big V, southern cross, 7½-27, acey-deucey, and any other game you could dream up, including high-low variations of each.

The most stupid one had to be Indian poker.

Each player is dealt one card, face down. Without looking at it, you had to bring it up to your forehead facing outward, so you could see what everybody else had, without knowing what you had. They called it Indian poker because the card was supposed to be your feather.

Then, you'd bet like crazy. Stupid!
Then, you'd declare high or low. Stupid, stupid!
Then, you'd bet like crazy again. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Then, you look at your card and see that you had a deuce and had been betting like crazy that you had a high card.

It was a real stupid game, but it was hilarious, and it had us rolling in hysterics on the floor at least a dozen times during the night.

The first pizza I ever ate was at Sylvia Hara's birthday party in early 1961. Can you believe it?

I used to read a lot of Archie comics, and it was through the Riverdale gang that I learned a lot about what teen-agers on the mainland did during their spare time.

Apparently, getting an ice cream soda and hamburgers at the soda fountain, and going for pizza were two of their favorite pastimes. Ice cream sodas and hamburgers I understood, but I had never had a pizza. In fact, none of my friends had ever had a pizza.

Jackie Gleason mentioned going out for pizza pies on The Honeymooners television show, and Perry Como sang about how "the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie" in Amore. So we knew about pizzas, and more or less about what they were.

But Pizza Hut, Shakeys and Domino's were decades away from being the fast-food sensations they would become, and we had never seen -- much less eaten -- a pizza.

What a deprived life we led.

At 11 p.m. one night during my senior year, I had just gone to bed when a brilliant white flash from outside lit up my bedroom. I knew exactly what it was. I jumped out of bed, ran outside and looked up to see a multi-color glow in the moonless skies above.

It was the reflection from a nuclear bomb that was being tested that night on Johnson Island. I called everybody outside and we all stared at the display until it slowly faced from view.

The next day, the Honolulu Advertiser ran a picture of the fireball -- a small glowing pearl on the horizon, with Diamond Head in the foreground, as seen from the top of Tantalus in Makiki.