In His Own Words

100:00September Third, 1961. Craigie has been asking me for days to tape some of the various incidences of things that have happened at school and other little things that I remember as a young boy.

200:16Even as a grown up man, it would take a lot more than just this side or another side to record all of the various things that have bothered the young growing up boy from childhood to boyhood to manhood and then later on to old age.

300:38As you know, I'm an old 65 year old man now retired and been so for the last three months.

400:45Anyway, it's not a bad life. It's a life that we adjust ourselves to. Just getting back from a three weeks vacation spent in Tahiti, one of which was with Craigie who acted as our interpreter.

501:02He acted very well as a French Tahitian and maybe Hawaiian interpreter for us there.

601:09We did enjoy the visit and met many interesting people. Many, many interesting people. One of which was a Polish officer of the world war that escaped from Warsaw going into Germany and out.

701:30His story in itself would be well worthwhile and someday I wish that Craig would get him on this mic and have him tell it in his own way. It would be a very interesting tape. In fact, I've often thought it would be nice to write him up.

801:46Now, going back to one of the incidents in my life, I can remember my first little pet. It was a little bit of a chicken. This little chick must have been a pullet of about maybe two or three months.

902:03We lived in a little lane off Beretania Street which is now built up with buildings. It was a residential area when I was a little boy, but it is now an industrial area and also automotive.

1002:18Many, many concerns, furniture, buildings and so forth are all about. In fact, right close by the highway has been cut so that the old landmarks are now long forgotten.

1102:33But coming back to this first pet, it was one of the pets that I well remember, but the first one could have been a pup dog that I grew up with as a little boy that I used to use a hammer to knock sense into its head.

1202:50It was a bullpup and I guess the dog was big enough at that time. I used to be mean to it as a little year and a half or two year old boy from what my mother said. I used to beat its head with a hammer and the dog just used to enjoy it.

1303:06I guess maybe it's when I stopped that he felt the greatest thrill. When I was doing it, I guess the little dog didn't enjoy it too much. Anyway, that possibly could have been my first real pet, but I have no recollection of that at all.

1403:24I do have of this little white leghorn pullet. It seemed that one evening I was sitting on the little lanai. It was a very peculiar built cottage that we lived in. It had all the lanai on one side. It was facing a back lot and it had one or two houses on that lot.

1503:49Anyway, as evening tide came about and the sun was setting, I noticed this little white pullet walking slowly along the little plot of grass that we had to a vine that was shading the one side of the porch or lanai.

1604:09I watched this little pullet walk slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, and it kind of furtively looked around and so, who are you watching me? But anyway, I acted like one that wasn't paying too much attention to something and the little pullet disappeared and I noticed that it was climbing up to a little spot in this vine and sure enough it perched there.

1704:38And every evening it would come back where it would go during the day I wouldn't know because at that time I didn't pay much attention to not being big enough to chase chickens around. I used to sit back and wait for this little bird to come in.

1804:58And I think I finally got so became quite friendly and became quite a pet. I believe that eventually it was a part of our little household and I never did remember the time because I think we actually moved away from the area.

1905:19And possibly the man who may have owned the chickens in and about that neighborhood claimed it and I soon forgot and lost this little pet. It became only a memory.

2005:35Then as time went on, we moved away from this area and we moved to another little street where a man used to raise pigeons and he raised fantail pigeons and it was the first time that I ever saw pigeons that looked so fancy.

2105:55They had their fancy little tails all strutted out and they would bend back their heads and walk about, not like the fantails of today because they have bred them to a fine point. So today they really are fantails and they walk back as proud as peacocks.

2206:12That little fantail was a little fantail that I had to buy from this young man who was not a very fine young man. He took advantage of a little boy that saved up a couple of dollars and bought this fantail.

2306:29I think I didn't get the dollars but I was given a little wristwatch or maybe it was a little dollar watch. It couldn't have been a very expensive watch. It was given to me possibly by some friends of our family and I think I bought it.

2406:48I think I gave this fellow my watch for this little fantail and that fantail was the beginning of many, many little pigeons and fantails and Homer pigeons and others that I acquired as time went on.

2507:04After we left this area, we moved out to the Kalihi Valley where I collected several pigeons, not too good variety of stock. They were just common pigeons and I had a little pigeon house built over the back barn that we had in the back of this house that we lived in which had a big, big mango tree.

2607:31I could well remember as a little boy the joy and fun I had of feeding these birds and watching them fly. Of course, that time we built the pigeon houses way out of reach of the cats and the wild mongoose that were around at that time and maybe rats too.

2707:54Anyway, we built them so that they were on posts and the little houses were always out of reach so that we never had much chance to ever look in to watch them build their nests the way they built their nests and to watch them hatch their young and feed them.

2808:11We could hear the noise from the ground and that was as far as we could tell that they were young. But later on, we'd see the young come out and feed. Well, that phase grew away to other little phases of pigeon raising and all and it went into a larger scale as I grew older.

2908:33But I can remember in this area that we lived in was at Kalihi and I can well remember all the things that we used to do as little boys. The mynah birds across the house from where we lived was a narrow street. There was a big banyan tree and every evening the birds from all over.

3008:51They were all screechy howling mynah birds. They used to come in there and every night they'd screech and yell as mynah birds do until quite a late hour.

3109:03Even during the night, I'd hear as a little boy the yelling of the mynah bird. But it was a nice feeling. It never made us feel too lonesome or too much away from others because there's always life around the place.

3209:20Even the birds were yapping in the night or the dogs would be barking in the neighborhood. So we never felt isolated, although Kalihi at that time was really a very isolated area with very few houses.

3309:34And it was at that time that we lived there that I went swimming in the old Kalihi stream. First time I'd ever went swimming in fresh water.

3409:46It was a stream that wasn't very clean, although there were many houses above them because that is above where we swam or this little pool that was there.

3509:58And everybody used to go swimming in there. That is where I first had my introduction to swimming in the muddy, murky waters of a freshwater stream that came from the upper mountains of Kalihi.

3610:15We used to have lots of fun there and many of the kids would play and dive around and I'm quite sure that my swimming outfit would be possibly an old pair of pants or something.

3710:27And the little girls in the neighborhood would go swimming with their little holokus or whatever they were wearing.

3810:35But anyway, we'd all jump into the old stream and waddle around and many of the boys that became swimmers later on learned to swim in that little stream.

3910:48I doubt if I learned to swim in that stream because I think later on I learned at a different area in the saltwater, but that was many years later.

4010:59My goal is to really swim on my own. I must have been around 11 or 12 years old at that time too, although I always thought that I could swim when I was much younger, but I doubt if I was able to stay up any more than a dog or a cat would be if he was sold into the water.

4111:18I think I just bashed around and made a lot of splashes and that's the way we stayed up.

4211:25It was while we were living in this area, I used to have to take my father's dinner for two weeks, quite a long walk from where we lived to the pumping station where he worked.

4311:40I used to take the dinners down, my brother and I would walk down and it would be for two weeks of every month.

4411:50It got to be sort of a chore and then we had to leave early in the morning to walk to the Kam School [Kamehameha] which was close by to get the milk.

4512:00We used to go to the dairies, we used to watch the Kam School [Kamehameha] boys milk the cows and then strain the milk and put it into the containers and take it home.

4612:10Those days we didn't even know about pasteurized milk. I guess the cows were healthy because the milk didn't affect us any, none of us ever took sick from it.

4712:23So I guess it was pretty good stock that was giving us the milk that we lived on.

4812:32But that was a chore that we used to take as part of our daily routine.

4912:38Going to school from there was a long, long way.

5012:42I well remember the first yacht race from San Francisco to Honolulu.

5112:48It was at about that time around 1906, the middle part or the earlier part of 1906 and it may have been the latter part of 1905.

5213:01It was around that time that the yachts came in for the first Trans-Pacific race and I remember my brother and I were all dressed up in white.

5313:13My dad was going to take us down to see the yachts after Sunday school and we were to meet him.

5413:22Somehow or another we got waylaid and there was a little baseball game going on and the next thing you know we were in the game.

5513:31White suits and all didn't take long before they were covered with red dirt and slush because we played baseball in a real rugged way.

5613:40We slid to first base or we slid home. We did things that boys shouldn't do with nice Sunday suits on.

5713:48We never did get to see the yacht. I think we were taken home and severely reprimanded for being so stupid.

5813:58It was in this area too, well I remember coming home from school one day, there was taro patches on King Street and Gulick Avenue, which is one of the roads that we used to take to go home.

5914:11And the taro patch that was right on King Street, it was quite a large taro patch.

6014:18And it seemed that one particular afternoon that makes me remember the taro patch was the fact that I got off the car, stepping off.

6114:27Instead of correctly I was facing the rear end of the car and I stepped off and there was just enough momentum to set me on my tail.

6214:37And the way I went over school books and all into this muddy slushy water, that was a deal that I would never forget because it was a little surprising to be suddenly dunked into a taro patch with mud and slush.

6314:54But those days things didn't seem to phase much. I remember picking up the little bag that I was carrying with the books and splashed off as much as I could of the slush that was on them.

6415:09And walked on my way home, which was about three quarters of a mile from where we had taken off.

6515:18That was one of the things that would be outstanding in memory of some of the foolhardy things of youth.

6615:26Later on I was walking by, it was the different phases of things that happened in this area, which was an interesting part because all the people that lived there were people of mostly Hawaiian and some mixtures of Hawaiian.

6715:45Very few of the Caucasians lived around there because it was not quite a Caucasian area.

6815:51And it was the place we had to live because my dad was in charge of the pump at Kalihi and that was the only available place we could stay.

6916:00Across the street I believe was an Englishman that was the owner of some meat market and I believe the man's name was Wallace.

7016:11But anyway that was about the only Caucasian that I well remembered on our little street.

7116:17Although right next door on another street was the Cannon family. They were quite a musical group.

7216:23They belonged to the Salvation Army and they used to sing Salvation Army songs and they blew the horns and played the drums and everyone was pretty brilliant in some instrument of music.

7316:38And I sort of always wondered why they were so musical and we were so stupid. We couldn't even sing a note.

7416:46But time moved on and we moved away from the area but before we did I can remember an incident that was very unusual.

7516:57This one evening I was walking close by home and I walked off to another little side street that was just a narrow alley and I heard some noises in one of the houses.

7617:10It sounded like a peculiar sound and it wasn't a natural sound. It seemed a little bit eerie.

7717:18As a little boy it annoyed me a little bit so I walked into the yard and up the steps and onto the porch of this house to figure out what the deuce was coming from this room.

7817:34And when I got up to the porch I looked in and there I saw lots of Hawaiian people sitting around and they were all wailing and singing the Hawaiian sort of wail or I guess you'd call it a wail.

7917:52Maybe it was a sort of a song of a chant of the history of this man who happened to be lying on a little couch and in this room I figured he was asleep and there was some sort of a game.

8018:13I suddenly realized when somebody close by said oh this man make [Hawaiian: dead] and I knew the word make meant dead so at that time I happened to see lying on this couch I guess the first dead person that I ever saw.

8118:35And the fact that I saw the dead person didn't bother me as much as the ungodly shrieks and wails and sounds that these Hawaiians could sing out and really say so little.

8218:51It wasn't words it seemed to be just a lot of sounds.

8318:56Anyway this was my first experience with somebody that passed on.

8419:02Moving away from that goes onto a little area which I think I will stop for a while to see how this sounds because this would go on to another area where we did things that were just as bad as a lot of deviltry too.

8519:20And Craig is going to play it back to see how this sounds.

8619:24Okay.

8719:26Well, we've got it on the tape again.

8819:32All of my talk from nine thirty to ten o'clock or thereabouts on things that happened were for naught.

8919:39This beautiful set that we bought for so many dollars and cents did not record a darn bit of the last half hour tape that I made.

9019:49So I'm going to start it again and how my mind will ever pick up where I left off I'll never know because I talked at random last evening.

9119:59Craig is insistent that I make these tapes.

9220:03Unfortunately when we try to recollect where we left off I haven't any idea.

9320:11I talked about school, I talked about different things that are scaring people, I talked about the various sundry things that happened, sitting on the little cottage and all.

9420:25All of those things I'll try to recount again because it was a waste of half an hour of my time and I was very insistent that we were to make this tape last evening because I think we were really tired.

9520:39In fact the operator I know was tired because he fell asleep five minutes after we closed this thing down.

9620:48I was talking about living in a place where we had different things happen and it was a little hard for me to go into that but I'll bring that in at a later point.

9721:03I'll talk on something new today, something so different than what I talked about last night.

9821:08I'll have to make this later on because it's a playback of different things that come out in sequence anymore.

9921:17One of the things that Craig wanted me to talk about was the time in boarding school, the different things we did while in boarding school.

10021:29All of this was quite some time after my dad had passed on. Prior to that most of the stuff that we talked about happened during his lifetime.

10121:43We were talking about having a trip to the mainland, one of the trips that we made was a little bit prior to what I had in the discussion because I had led this all up to the mainland.

10221:58We went up to the time of the tremendous earthquake in San Francisco of April 18th, that was in 1906 and how we went up to see the family, that is mother's family.

10322:13She had to make this trip I guess more to satisfy her own curiosity than it was to be with her own because they never did get along, they just had wars from the moment they met to the time they left.

10422:24Well that's the way families are, I surmise. Coming back to what Craig wanted me to talk about was this trip that we made in 1906 on the Sierra was not a very fateful trip.

10522:38I was saying how I had to clean out the old Polly's cage and that was my Saturday's job.

10622:44It was a big, big bulky cage for little kids to handle but we used to lug it down to the yard, run the hose on the bottom platform, get it all cleaned off and then wet the bird down a bit.

10722:59It would have its little shower bath and Polly's in my mind about the dirtiest birds there are, maybe mynah birds a little worse.

10823:09Coming to this trip I was ready to go but I think I had a little infection on my forehead due to maybe a mosquito bite or scratching or a little bump that occurred which paid, that's what I paid or nobody else paid much attention to.

10923:34And then when I got on board ship I think possibly we scratched the thing by our finger handling the rails and all which were lots of brass, polished brass all around.

11023:49It may have been that I gave myself a metallic poisoning but anyway it seemed that I went to bed that night and nothing was any different than the fact that I had this little bump on the forehead.

11124:02But it was during the night when my mother got up and she noticed that my eyes were closed and my ears were all puffed up, in fact I was a swollen pup.

11224:12She was quite perturbed and worried, called the ship's doctor who just came in and said, oh we'll put a poultice on that and they made a linseed meal poultice and put it on my forehead.

11324:25And it seemed that in an hour or so it had drawn things to quite a head but the swelling was still there and my mother was very much perturbed and said to the doctor that they ought to be able to do something more than just put a poultice on.

11424:42And he said well he didn't know anything more about that so she said well if you have no objections I'm going to see if there's a doctor among the passengers which she did.

11524:54And she got the permission of the captain to have one of the passengers look at me and he being a practicing physician had to have the permission of the captain before he could do anything to me on board this ship.

11625:11The captain granted permission because he felt that the ship's doctor was not capable of handling a case such as that I had, I guess really blood poisoning is worse.

11725:25The ship's doctor stood by and watched the doctor perform, bringing his own kit and boiling the instruments and taking care of all of which I have no recollection at all about because it possibly was that I was already sort of in a semi-conscious condition.

11825:51All I can remember is what was told me by my mother and my aunt or my cousin who was with us. This was my cousin Lena who was going back with us.

11926:05Well anyway the doctor got the instruments all cleaned and boiled and he said to my mother I have to lance this and he proceeded to lance this infection that I had on the forehead.

12026:22Then he just pushed this sharp blade in and out came all the poison and matter that was within this confined area.

12126:34It wasn't very long after that the poultices and various other medicinal treatments were applied and by morning the swelling had gone down quite a bit.

12226:48The ears were nearly normal and the eyes were partly open but it seemed that by 10 or 11 o'clock the following day I was no longer in danger of dying from blood poisoning.

12327:02And in the day or so I was up and around again running about a happy carefree young boy arriving in San Francisco at a later date only to see the ruins of the tremendous earthquake and fire that had taken place leaving San Francisco in a pretty bad state of affairs.

12427:27I can remember walking with my grandmother along with us by the city hall and seeing the rubble and the disaster that had happened to it and how the windows had fallen out and the many many of the pieces of structural fabrication that could have been concrete, it could have been most anything, it could have been plaster.

12527:50Whatever they used, the building, the building at the time, there were parts of it all over the grounds and we walked along the various streets seeing the damage that had been done.

12628:04The streets were all in a state of confusion. There was big, big holes in some spots and they were repairing other little spots but the condition of the city itself was just chaotic.

12728:20There was nothing other than just debris. It was as though somebody had thrown a big bomb and now that we live in an age of atomic bombs, this was I guess a way that the good Lord would show people that he still had powers to supersede the efforts of man in destruction.

12828:45One severe earthquake and the shake that occurs with the earthquake is sufficient to make people realize that there's a tremendous force in nature. This also runs to tidal waves.

12929:04We remember staying there for quite some time and we lived with my aunt and family and I think we moved out to either Santa Fe [San Rafael?] or Berkeley but we moved out into the various areas.

13029:26Sausalito was one and Berkeley was another and I remembered we had to go to school but we didn't have anybody take us. My mother would never think of taking us to enlist or enroll in the school and I remember my brother and I walked down to a school that was in the neighborhood about a mile from where we lived.

13129:53We just walked in and asked if we could enroll and the teacher said yes, where are you from and so forth we told her. The next thing we knew we would go to school but we had to do it ourselves. There was no mother to take care of that problem. It was our own problem.

13230:13We went to school and had quite a bit of fun in this big school. We were, as you know, fenced off with a big fence, the boys on one side and the girls on the other. That was the way schools used to be.

13330:29When we went in Sausalito and later on in Berkeley, Berkeley School was kind of a nice school. Sausalito was not too bad. I can remember when we used to walk to school we'd pass by a spot where the prizefighters were practicing or getting in condition to fight.

13430:50Many, many of the world's heavyweights practiced and sparred in this little area of San Rafael. It seemed though that I remembered Tommy Burns who was one of the champions practicing for a fight he was going to have down in Australia.

13531:15This was a little village or town which is now quite grown up that he practiced in. San Rafael was a nice little spot. We enjoyed living there. We lived in an old French family there at the big two story house.

13631:31We had a little area on the second floor. I remember once my brother Charlie was a little boy, not too old, possibly seven or eight months old. I was walking down the stairway with him and boom, I tripped and fell and both of us rolled down the stairway.

13731:55I of course was severely reprimanded for being careless but we got off of that escapade I guess by quick thinking because we, in falling, sort of protected the little fellow from getting badly hurt.

13832:14Although my mother claimed that he was hurt but there was nothing to show that he had any injuries other than the fact that he was just a little baby that was quite afraid.

13932:25And if we look back now I guess the stairs wasn't as badly heighted as it was led to be because the floors at that time may have been just a few feet above the necks so that rather than being a long stairway it was just one of those very short ones so that Charlie wasn't too badly hurt.

14032:53It was while we were living at the Albus [?] family that was in Santa Fe [San Rafael?] that I remembered thinking about the prior escapade we had just before we left and walking into a house that had been fumigated for bubonic plague that was at Honolulu.

14133:20The reason I mention that is my brother and I had walked into this house that was being fumigated and was severely reprimanded by the Board of Health men for even venturing as close as we did.

14233:37And I remember how your mind would play tricks on you. We went for a hike in Santa Fe [San Rafael?] with the family that owned the premises that we lived in and we went to pick fruit.

14333:56But we didn't know that the olive trees were just like kukui nuts that inside the nut all the walnut trees were like kukui nuts too that there was a hardened outside skin that you would have to break through to bring out the walnut.

14434:21The olives were green things that had to be cured to get to be brown. They had to be treated in vinegar. We thought that olives just grew on trees the way they were as they were served on the table.

14534:35But while we were parading around hunting and picking up walnuts and plums and various sundry fruits that were in this orchard that was close by to where we lived, I think that the stain from the walnut stained our hands.

14634:56I remember going home and not paying much attention until after dinner and then when we washed our hands and went out to bed I looked down and saw my hands were all purplish brown in color and then my little mind started to work thinking about what we'd heard about bubonic plague and how the bodies turned purple black.

14735:23And right away I thought, my gosh, here I have the plague. And there was not much sleep that night because my hands were all discolored. But it was just the hands and little did I know or little did we even think that it was due to the walnut that was staining our hands just like the kukui nut would stain here in Hawaii.

14835:47But anyway, stained it were and here we were with hands quite blackened and our wives quite upset. The next morning we got up and the discoloration was still there.

14936:04But going to school we mentioned it to the teacher and she said oh no that is just dying from the walnut plant that made it dark. You are perfectly alright.

15036:15And we then thought that well maybe there was some truth to being perfectly alright and off we went sound asleep and that was the end of that part of the worry. We did not have the bubonic plague.

15136:32Now many, many sudden things happened while we were living in that area. Many, many things that were not good. Many, many things that were alright.

15236:45We had many arguments at home. I guess being young boys we enjoyed little tiffs and fights and our cousins being girls didn't get along too well with us.

15336:57Or we didn't get too well with them. Anyway we had many little disturbing facts. And then later on we moved from Santa Fe [San Rafael?] and went into Berkeley proper.

15437:13Just before we came home we lived in Berkeley and I remember getting up in the morning and the fog was so thick that we had to sort of dig our way through it to find our way to school.

15537:25We used to pass the University of California and I always used to think how wonderful it would be to be someone that could go to a university. How smart you'd have to be.

15637:36Because it did look like a very promising college or university because that goes back many, many years.

15737:46We finally boarded a ship and came back to Honolulu. It was the month of January and it was a rough, rough trip back. I well remember the bouncing of the ship.

15838:00It was the old Hilonian. It was a Matson [?] ship. It was a Spanish war ship that was taken over by the government after the Spanish-American war and converted into a freighter.

15938:12And we came back and ran into our luck being against us again into a very severe storm that bounced and buffed us about for many, many an hour.

16038:28In fact, it went on for about two days and I remember sitting on a barrel. It was sort of a barrel that they had by the engine room and I don't know for what reason it was there.

16138:42But my brother and I were sitting on it and one of the waves hit the boat and the way she rolled and rocked and the way the barrel went with us on top and how we sprawled in this room.

16238:55Luckily, we didn't hit our heads on any of the metal that was part of the makeup of this room. We finally made up our minds that we'd have to be pretty brave to weather this storm.

16339:12And when we got into Honolulu, after several days of being buffeted around just like a cork on the water in a bathtub, we were bounced about.

16439:25And when we got into Honolulu, we looked at the smokestack and it was just white with the salt that had crystallized from the salt water onto the smokestack.

16539:37The heat of the smokestack made the evaporation of the water more complete, leaving the residue, which was the salt, sticking to the smokestack.

16639:52So we arrived, got back home, and lived out a little place on Young Street near the Dairyman's Association or close by where Sears is now.

16740:05It was opposite the government nursery, which is the headquarters now for the Board of Agriculture.

16840:15But we didn't have too much fun in this neighborhood being just back from the mainland. We didn't know anybody there.

16940:24And getting ready for school again and going to school wasn't much of a joke.

17040:31We lived there a short while, and Mother and Dad decided to buy a piece of property on Kaimuki.

17140:40A piece of property on Center Street at Kaimuki at that time was a desolate little village, you may say, or just a township of very few people.

17240:52And all below us, looking toward Kahala way and the Pacific Ocean or Koko Head way, Diamond Head way from the hillside where we lived, there was nothing but klu bushes and coconut trees along the seashore.

17341:11But other than that, nothing but just pasture land for cattle and cactus growing all over the place.

17441:20But there wasn't a house between where we lived on this little hill and the ocean below, except for the Isenberg home that was on the farm site right at the water's edge at Kahala.

17541:35Today, all of that area is all built up with houses and all. But Mother and Dad bought this, and our work took place where we had to keep cleaning the yard and throwing rocks.

17641:49We had more rocks than we had grass, and eventually we worked and we helped and we worked to get the place cleaned up.

17742:00And we finally got it so that there was a lawn and the few trees that we had were bearing fruit, the fig trees.

17842:12I later on bought alligator pear trees and put them on the premises, and I think there's one or two of them still there that were planted many, many years ago.

17942:25Now, the event of living in Kaimuki was a change from all the things that we had had in the past because now we were the owners of a piece of property that cost all of $1,200 with the house and the lot of about 18,000 feet, costing us about $1,200.

18042:54Today, the land alone is assessed at about $70,000, so you can see the immense growth of values and I guess maybe, too, the shrinkage of our buying power of the American dollar.

18143:11But, Kaimuki was the changing point of our life. It became sort of something solid and the foundations upon which we grew seemed to have grown from the rocks, just blue lava rocks and the whole, whole spot.

18243:32In fact, where we bought, at one time, this little hill called Mauʻumae Hill, it possibly could have been a cinder cone because as we were working and digging away, we always would dig into lava, a sort of a shale that in many cases was still very red and black.

18343:57So that it did seem to be something not too many years old, possibly out of the minds of any history that may have been memorized by the Hawaiians or written by them.

18444:13But, possibly in the last couple hundred years, it may have been an active cinder cone. We grew fig trees and we had several other types of trees on the premises and watched alligator pears grow to a real heavy abundance of fruit that we appreciated very much.

18544:43I raised rabbits and I had chickens and I had pigeons. In fact, we had quite a little farm and I used to work the little farm myself. I used to raise the chickens in the summer and hatch them with incubators and then raise the baby chicks.

18645:01After they grew up to a size that was saleable, I'd sell them and I'd put away a little bit of money, enough to carry us on for the school year that would follow.

18745:14But every summer we had some project and that was the one project that I utilized to get spending money to enable me to have it for school when we needed it later on.

18845:29This purchase took place in 1908 and we bought this place. The reason I bring it up today, we just ran across some papers that had something to do with the buying of it.

18945:48It was an old package of deeds and so forth. I haven't looked through them but it was found in a suitcase that Mother had put away someplace. But anyway, it was among the papers and sometime soon I will check into it.

19046:04But living at Kaimuki brought to us many, many happy moments and many, many sad ones. It was while we were living here and we were just getting happy and enjoying things so much that around the June of 1909,

19146:28my dad complained of severe headaches and not knowing that he had been hurt in an accident by testing some water pipes on a fire hydrant and got hit in the back of his head.

19246:44And there were no x-rays or no way for doctors to know how badly injured he was. They just said, all these pills will fix you up and they figured that was sufficient.

19346:58Dad complained of these headaches and my mother not being too well versed in anything at all just listened to him talk about it.

19447:08The next thing we knew he was really sick and he only lived a few weeks after the first complaint. But my mother, as I say, was not versed in medicine.

19547:23She knew nothing and we were too young, not quite 13. Or if we were, we would just hit 13. So we weren't too smart either, knowing what was wrong.

19647:35It seemed that dad complained of nausea and so forth and so on. And when they finally examined him and all, they found out that he had a road in the back of his head that had been pressed up against the lower part of his brain, causing a general breakdown of his nervous system.

19748:01So that when dad died, a man had never been sick a day in his life. He just went quickly and I guess in a very unhappy state of mind because he had no way to talk about what was bothering him.

19848:19His whole nervous system was shattered. We never did see him after they took him out of the house to go to the hospital. It may have been the fault of my mother who should have taken us down, but she was afraid of hospitals herself, afraid of undertaking parlors, afraid of churches.

19948:42She was afraid of everything that had something to do with the Almighty. It seemed that she was afraid of everything that was above her way of reasoning.

20048:51She unfortunately was a person possessed of a thought that everything existed around herself. And as long as she was well, and as long as she could take care of herself, that was all.

20149:09She gave little thought to the pains and aches of others. That was mother's big fault, unfortunately. She did not know exactly what to do in an emergency of that kind.

20249:27But mom, as we called her, didn't feel too bad. She felt a little bit upset. I remember how bad we felt when they told us one morning that my dad had passed on.

20349:46We were then staying with my aunt at Palolo Valley in an old stone house. And I can remember that morning we were sitting at the table. It was July the 7th of 1909.

20449:58And we were eating a very meager breakfast of possibly chicken feed or something cooked like a mush because the boys treated us like we were paupers.

20550:10And we were really ruggedly handled. And instead of having real up-to-date, fine breakfasts and nice lunches and dinners we ate, I always said that just reached the feed bag of the chickens and put it into the pots and cooked it for us from mush.

20650:36I guess we had chicken only when the chickens died. They never killed them. I guess they waited until they died. Then they served them.

20750:44But our bringing up and growing with them for a while was pathetic because I can remember this morning we were sitting about and a tall, ghastly looking man came in and said that to my mother.

20851:04To my mother who was sitting beside us at this table, well Jim, my father, has just passed away during the night. And of course mother felt bad.

20951:15We were too young to really know what it was all about. A little bit shocked. But that was it.

21051:22We had no more worries than about a father that may get angry or beat us up or something of the sort.

21151:33My mother always used to throw up at us how he was a violent, tempered person and how he'd blow up and do things that had no control in the way of temper and so forth.

21251:47We had never seen too much of him in the thirteen years that we had known him. Many of them which were young years. We never knew them then because our memories took hold possibly when we were around six or seven.

21352:06But there's incidences in mind that I can well remember how my mother used to wait until he came home from work to tell him what bad boys we were and how he'd come upstairs and give us a lecture and oftentimes take a belt and spank us for being such bad boys.

21452:25And the badness that I know was not the teenage badness of today but it was just boys growing up.

21552:36And what my mother called bad was the fact that my brother and I used to fight like boys would do.

21652:44We'd wrestle, we'd box and we'd hit each other and we'd always be taking a poke at each other just because we were growing up just like animals in the field.

21752:56It wasn't because we were jealous of each other, it wasn't because we were mean or hated each other, it was just because we did not understand the growing up of children.

21853:10We didn't know what it was, we just did things and of course everything we did was wrong.

21953:16And my mother was sort of a tattletale and she'd tell my dad who would come upstairs and berate us for being such bad boys and he'd be worried because he thought we were annoying the mother to a degree.

22053:31We never really were sassy, we never got mean, we'd just go out and do things of our own.

22153:40We'd run possibly to the neighbors to play but we always had our jobs to do.

22253:47And my mother had us trained because she didn't have any daughters but we were trained like daughters because I could well remember the different chores that we had to do.

22353:58I had to take care of certain things on a Saturday.

22454:03My job was cleaning the ice box, polishing the stove and taking out the ashes.

22554:08We had an old wedge wood burner that we had to keep the kindling wood and go around and gather up hardwood to burn.

22654:18And the porch I had to sweep down and I'd have to take a cloth with kerosene oil to wipe off the furniture and polish the chimneys for the kerosene oil lamps and all of these sundry little chores.

22754:35And it wasn't nice for a little boy growing up around 12, 13 years old to have all of these things to do.

22854:42But we did them and I looked back now and I had a brother that was a very smart guy.

22954:52In a way he'd do all of the singing and antics.

23054:57He'd act like a clown and I'd be working like a fool, laughing at all of his silliness and all those stupid tricks he would be pulling off.

23155:07He'd be the stage actor while I was doing the work and laughing at what he was doing.

23255:13He was just passing the buck. He never did anything at all.

23355:17But that was one of the smart things that he had over me and that was the ability to always grin and smile away at things that would annoy him most.

23455:33It ended up where most of the menial work was always done by myself.

23555:38I had to clean the yard and sweep the yard and I had to cross my chickens and do pigeons and things that were my own hobbies, hence I had to take care of them.

23655:48My brother Jim was a smart boy. He was brilliant and he knew how to get away with doing the menial things in life.

23756:01He was always the actor and I was the one that did the work.

23856:06But we finished our chores and grew up without too much worry.

23956:12I think now I've talked quite some time and I have not stressed too much on any of the things that I did last evening.

24056:24But in the course of making this record and when we turn it over on the other side, I will give incidences of many of the things that happened in the growing up stages of a boy in an area that is known as Kaimuki today.

24156:40When we were the first boys that lived there and the first young boys other than the family that lived way down on another avenue that grew up in this area.

24256:51If I had remained a part of Kaimuki to this day, I guess I would be about the oldest living citizen in that area that could talk about Kaimuki of 1907 and 1908.

24357:07The years that I knew it, when it was just a little overgrown, klu-bushed, kiawe and cactus area with a few houses.

24457:23In 1905, Palolo Valley, I remember going up and staying up there when it was homestead land and making my mud pies.

24557:34I was nine years old. I was supposed to be pretty smart, but I did those things because we had nothing else to do.

24657:43I made kites and I made my own little wagons and things, but that was way back, four years before we ever moved to where we did finally go.

24757:54Now, Craigie is going to stop this and I will continue after we play it back, I hope, this time and record it because last night the whole half hour was wasted.

24858:07I can't understand, with an expensive machine such as this, to have an error such as that occur was a little surprising to me because I thought this was a machine that was error-proof.

24958:20I'll hope for a bit. Bye-bye.

25058:23Well, now I'm back again this Labor Day. Craig and I just came in from outside in the yard. We had been working. We were burning things and cleaning up things.

25158:35Now we're getting things ready for Craig and his family to go back to Kahala.

25258:40Before we do the Transportation Act, we thought we'd finish up this side of the tape going back from where I left off.

25358:50As you know, I talked about Kaimuki and so forth and so on in my latter part of the tape.

25458:57Now, I'll jump back a bit to the time and I think all of this goes back to the time, and I don't know if the earlier part of the tape mentioned that, but where we lived up in the little house at Crady Lane,

25559:13where I mentioned the fact that while we were there, my aunt was living with us at the time and we were quite young and a burglar got into the house somehow.

25659:26My aunt heard the moving around. She must have been all of 20 years old, and she heard the moving around and opened up her bedroom door and saw a man in the hallway.

25759:37Well, she rushed back to the dresser drawer where my dad had left a revolver, which he told her that she should use if anyone ever attacked or ever came into the home.

25859:51She had never handled it or even tried to shoot this revolver at any time prior to this occasion.

25959:58Anyway, she rushed to the drawer, opened it, pulled this revolver, and very foolishly just shot right up into the ceiling.

26060:09The bullet, of course, went right through the ceiling and through the roof and out.

26160:13People heard the shot. Of course, it must have scared the daylights out of the person who was trying to rob the house.

26260:20My mother was in the other room. We were the guests sound asleep, but the confusion had all awakened us.

26360:29And from the story as it was told to us, the burglar got away, and the neighbors from all directions started pouring into the premises trying to be of some assistance.

26460:42My mother, in a very hysterical state of affairs and with a lot of imagination, saw a head coming from the back part of the house,

26560:52and it was a poor neighbor from the back trying to get in the back door.

26660:57And he took the shortcut, and the mother yelled out, there he is, there he is, and everybody was ready to take a pot shot when he yelled out,

26761:07Well, I'm only the neighbor next door. What's the big idea trying to shoot me?

26861:12Well, anyway, that was an escapade that left its imprint on both my mother and my aunt for all through their lives.

26961:20I doubt if ever a night ever went by without them looking into the closed closets or under the beds to find what they always expected to find,

27061:30somebody lurking ready to pounce upon them and rob them of all their belongings.

27161:36But it never did happen all the years until quite later in the period of time, which I will talk about at a later date.

27261:47My aunt stayed with us until we moved and went back to the mainland, and she accompanied us then.

27361:57But as I say, as a young boy, I made many trips to the mainland because my mother had the wanderlust being, I guess,

27462:04a very unhappy woman here in Hawaii, being by herself as most of her family lived on the mainland.

27562:11Now, I remember the Christmas that we had in this house at Crady Lane.

27662:18It was a very nice Christmas, one of the first, I guess, that we could well remember.

27762:24My brother Jim got a steam train that ran with an alcohol burner and a real water boiler, and it blew a whistle,

27862:32and he ran on tracks, and he had quite some time.

27962:35And I got a tricycle, and I was very proud of that tricycle rode all around the neighborhood.

28062:42And in fact, the first day being Christmas Day, rode with, I don't know, maybe my dad,

28162:49because I doubt if my mother ever would walk with us.

28262:52But it possibly was my dad. Anyway, I remember riding along Thurston Avenue, which was the avenue facing,

28363:00or the lane cut into this avenue, and it ended up where our ride was at the Makiki Cemetery.

28463:07Cemeteries at that age meant nothing to us, other than a lot of stones and fancy formation.

28563:17Whatever they meant meant nothing to us, because as youngsters, our death is far from thought.

28663:26And as the Makiki Cemetery was only a place where the dead slept, it didn't bother us as youngsters.

28763:33We only looked to the living and life that was before us.

28863:38We left Crady Lane after some time, but prior to that, and just before leaving,

28963:44I remembered my brother and I getting underneath the house. It was quite a high, stilted house.

29063:51The basement was quite high. We had no trouble crawling.

29163:55In fact, a six-foot-six man would have no trouble crawling under it.

29263:59And there were a lot of boxes in this basement, and my brother Jim and I decided to open one of them.

29364:07After prowling about, we finally found some sort of a way to open a box, which we did.

29464:17And we opened it and found funny-looking things that we couldn't figure out what they were,

29564:24because we'd never seen them before.

29664:26Anyway, there were gruesome heads and very gruesome skulls. It meant nothing to us.

29764:37There were skeletons, I guess, too.

29864:40Somehow or another, this man, I figured, kept part of his family.

29964:47Maybe he never buried them, but as it was, he had the skulls of these people in boxes,

30064:55and I guess the other boxes contained them, the skeletons.

30164:59But he was sort of a religious man, a fanatic.

30265:02I remembered him playing an accordion in town and singing psalms and all.

30365:07He was from Guam, so he wasn't an American. He was just a Guamanese.

30465:12But anyway, this skull act was the act that really got us kicked out of the house.

30565:20We were just pranksters, I guess, at heart.

30665:24We pulled one of these skulls out, and I passed one over to my brother,

30765:31and we got another one out, and we proceeded to walk upstairs into our house

30865:37and into the living room with these skulls just before us.

30965:43And we put them where our heads were, and we went into this living room and said,

31065:47Boo, like that.

31165:49Well, my mother was sitting in there with a lady.

31265:53They were knitting and doing a little bit of crochet work, it seems,

31365:57and this poor little lady was across the way pot-a-wine,

31466:02and when she saw these two pygmies walking in with these hideous masks before them,

31566:11and they were real skulls, she let out with a terrific, shrill scream

31666:17and proceeded to pass out completely.

31766:21We had never seen a person faint before, but this one really fainted the dead away.

31866:26Everybody was upset and really angry, but as the story was told later on,

31966:33it seemed that they sort of forgave the youngsters

32066:37because they didn't know exactly what they were playing with,

32166:42and I know for a fact that I had never seen one of those things before,

32266:45and it meant nothing to me.

32366:47I can shut my eyes now and see the big sockets, the skull and the teeth arrayed

32466:55and this grimacing jaw and so forth and so on

32566:59that we all know as being just skulls of people that have passed on.

32667:04But Mother got over it as well as the neighbor,

32767:08and we were forgiven after a due course,

32867:11and that was one of the highlights of our stay in Crady Lane.

32967:18The tape on this side has nearly ended,

33067:23and I think possibly I may have to stop the engineer.

33167:27Mr. Craig Walsh hasn't given me the signal yet,

33267:30but he does. I will bring this to an end.

33367:35We had moved around many, many places,

33467:39and Crady Lane was one of the first that I can well remember

33567:44as a youngster coming into the memory area.

33667:49Prior to that, most of it was stories told by either my mother or one of the family.

33767:57None of us actually remember the things that went up to the time

33868:02when you may have been five or six years old.

33968:04After that, it was a little bit of memory,

34068:08and then prior to that was a lot of hearsay.

34168:11But we always were told that we were the Katzenjammer Kids,

34268:15and we grew up with a complex that made us believe that everything we did was wrong,

34368:22which was not always the right thing for little boys

34468:25because I think we were just youngsters growing up.

34568:28Of course, my mother, being as she was a woman not used to boys,

34668:34always wanted girls.

34768:36It was hard for her to have them fight daily, as we used to fight.

34868:40Pau for now. Aloha. Good luck.