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MN: And during your childhood, I was wondering, who do you remember as being like your close group of friends? As a kid, who would you play with?

KM: My involvement was with the town kids, basically. But there were a couple of, well, it's because I used to deliver newspapers. My newspaper delivery was time consuming. For instance, my favorite recollection of newspaper delivery is that for many years, playing marbles was a big growing-up game that I was involved with many years. So, in delivering the newspapers, I had to schedule my delivery so that I know at a certain point of my delivery, I'm going to stop and get involved with, play marbles with particular individuals who were my classmates. That would take maybe sometimes half an hour, sometimes one hour. So my delivery was extended because of that. And I don't know, you see that, Jiro Watanabe was the steel guitar player from L Company. He passed away last year, but he was the steel guitar player from 442, akogare no, rest of the orchestra. He played steel guitar, all of the old Japanese songs and he would perform at weddings and this and that for many years. But from the very early times, when I was involved with marble playing, he was learning the ukulele. He would not get involved playing marbles with me or with our other friends, he would be strumming on the guitar, on the ukulele those years. From that early age, he was very interested in ukulele. And I got involved with marble playing, he  became a musician.

MN: And then besides marble playing, what else did you do for fun?

KM: We had this game called, it was made out of broomstick, you know the broomstick? It was a short handle and then there was a shorter stick that was cut at a bevel. What you did was you would lay it on the ground and you had to hit on the bevel, with the handle and it would pop in the air and then tell you how much, how many times you could...

WN: Peewee?

KM: That's right, it's called peewee. That was a popular game.

WN: So you hit it...

KM: You could do legs or number of times, the game was, you competed against each other. Besides that, as I said, we would catch birds once in a while. When I came near the chicken coop area, we would spend time catching birds if we could.

WN: How did you catch birds?

KM: We had that, what do you call that? Japanese sticky mochi.

WN: It's called torimochi.

KM: There's a phraseology which I forgot. It's not tori... I forgot the terminology but we would stick it onto the wire near the chicken farm, and the birds would perch on the wire and that's it. You know, if they're perched on the wire, that's it, we'd just go up there and get the birds. And so today, one of my tasks is to feed the birds in my yard, my driveway, because I remember the days when I used to partake of these birds. Not only that, later years, my brother's good friend from Molokai, Henry Yamashita, sent us, every so often, boxes of fully cleaned turtle or regular doves and we would have barbeque and teriyaki. Nowadays my task is to feed the turtledoves and birds that come around my yard to make up for the bad days.

MN: Besides catching birds, what else did you do outdoors in Kahului as a kid?

KM: Kahului was right next to the harbor. The beach was a big part of my activities. Growing up, several friends of mine, not only town boys but camp boys, would go swimming. And we stayed out on the beach until dark, until we know that our parents would be calling for us. Especially during the summer months, we just stay on the beach. If it's not swimming, we go fishing. Fishing was a big part of our pastime because there were spots on the harbor that under the wharf we could go and fish from. In later years, the possible entrance to these, under the wharf was closed because of, I don't know whether they were stopping us from going under the pier or because of controlling the rat infestation. I don't think it was rat infestation, it must be to stop people from going under the pier. But we used to do a lot of fishing under the pier. That's how I learned how to catch the yellow manini. Yellow manini were the ones that we go for or kumu or moano. Every so often, August, July and August, we'll have the running or we go crabbing for white crabs from the pier. That was very, very popular, crabbing. Those activities were always available to us.

MN: How about picking fruit?

KM: Oh, yeah. One of the other activities was... the library was located in Wailuku. And one of our activities growing up was, on Saturdays, I don't know what age or what, but there was a period of time when almost every Saturday we would go to the library and we had to walk. To go to library in those days, we didn't have that Kahumanu Avenue from Wailuku to Kahului, right through the sand here. We had to walk that long walk all the way around the Kahului Bay around to where that manju-ya was.

WN: Today they call it Beach Road?

KM: Beach Road, they call it Beach Road. It would take us about, it was about a two and a half miles or three miles from Kahului to the library. Other occasions, especially during summer months, we did a lot of... we didn't have money for extravaganzas. So a lot of these munching had to be seasonal. In other words, when the guava season was there, we would go picking guavas in Iao Valley. We had to go all the way up to the Iao Valley or to the river by Maui Dry Goods, a place, I forgot the place. But guava season we'd go up there, for mango season we'd get up to Iao Valley. And Iao Valley was about three miles from Kahului. But that was our summertime activity basically. Plum, I don't know, have you seen these black plums that, in Manoa stream has a lot of, right by Long's Drugs, so there's a lot of plums. But those plums were terrible. If you get them on a white shirt, you can't get the stains off. But that was one of our favorites. It was not as sweet, it was kind of bitter. But anything to munch on, we would go and pick these plum season, which was a lot of fun. We used to make juice out of it. There was one other fruit that we used to go and pick. I don't see it nowadays, but it's called, I remember we used to call mamee apple, the mamee apple. There were a couple of trees in Iao Valley. And we would know when the seasons was and we'd go up there to pick mamee apple. And, of course, a long ride was going out to Hana side, where there was mountain apples. August, I think, was the month that you'd go for mountain apple. And then in the Iao Valley they used to have what you called rose apple. And all of these fruits was our favorite, so-called, munching. We couldn't afford to buy these things. It wasn't on the market anyway. But the one thing was that most of us always learned the hard way, eating too much green guavas. That was terrible. All of us learned the hard way. But it was fun. Considering now you don't have kids walking three miles just to go have fun up in the valley or anything like that. But it was a regular thing for us during the summer months.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.