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SS: I ended up in Hilo on the island, on the Big Island on the Island of Hawaii and spent one year teaching there. I taught sociology classes. The University of Hawaii classes were held at the old Hilo boys' boarding school in those days, and the young people either lived in Hilo or were, came in from the surrounding sugar plantations, and they would come in these open air, they're like taxis. That was an interesting experience. First of all, they spoke a very strange English that I had a hard time understanding, and the boys would say to me, "You go, stay go." And I'd say, "I beg your pardon?" You go, stay go, and they talk so fast. I'd say, you go, stay go. It finally donned on me it means you go and you wait for me. And so that was quite a learning experience trying to decipher, and then they would recite in class, and I wouldn't be able to understand them. So between the two of us, it was a learning experience, but I loved it. They were a very gentle, great people. I'm not quite sure that they were college caliber at that point, which concerned me a little bit because, you know, the University of Hawaii, the Hilo branch at that point was only for freshmen and sophomores, and then they had to go to the mainland. Now I've discovered they have a whole, beautiful new campus and have all the facilities for a full four-year program; but in those days, it was just a fledging program. We were trying to get it off the ground. There were... one, two, three, four of us who were teaching there. The, of course it was very interesting. The students for some reason were mainly boys. There were a few girls, but the preponderance were boys, and they would bring rice balls for lunch, and I, onigiri, and I had never noticed that before. And they would go to a classroom, and they'd open up their lunch pails, and I guess if they had different flavorings inside the rice ball, they would pitch 'em to each other, and they would just throw these rice balls across the room at each other, and I thought, "Oh my goodness, this is a very interesting place." One day, I mentioned that I loved gardenias. No too far from campus, there was this place that grew gardenias I think for florists, their shipments, and I just happened to mention that, I don't know for what reason. And the next morning, I went into my classroom and someone had brought in a washtub full of gardenias, and it was so strong that you couldn't stay in there. [Laughs] They were just trying to be kind, so I thanked them, and we pulled it out on the porch so we could resume classes.

I found life in Hilo very interesting. It happened to be the year after the big flood. The downtown area of Hilo was still totally devastated. They were in the process of building this big wall of breakers around the bay to, I guess, help prevent any damage of any further big waves, I guess, that were caused by the tsunami, I guess. Mount Kilauea also erupted that year, and that was a beautiful sight, the red lava flowing down into the sea especially at night and also saw some interesting things. Of course, it was a great tourist attraction. I was down there one evening and here was this tourist, and they were dipping coins into the molten lava to have as souvenirs. Well, this one man thought he'd be smart, and he took a five dollar bill, and of course, it went up in flames. [Laughs] So my roommate and I, we shared a house. She was also a teacher, and she happened to have a car, and so we explored the island. We'd often go down to the Kona side from Hilo; and in those days, it was still almost in its native state. The boys would climb up the coconut trees and throw down coconuts to us. We stayed in a lady's house; I guess nowadays you would call it a bed and breakfast. There were no hotels or anything there in those days. There really was still, the island was very rural. I had an opportunity to fly over to Kona a couple of times and just, you know, we'd get invited out to the sugar plantations and see how they lived, and they'd all have these little company houses that they lived in.

The students were very interesting in that, for instance, the big social event was what they called a "heka party," and you'd go out on the beach, and out on the beach, then we'd get these little snails off the rocks. I think they were called opihis or something, and they would eat them raw. I couldn't eat them raw, but we would do that and dive into the surf, and it was just a very leisurely kind of life. The only problem was that it rains so much in Hilo. Not knowing this was going to happen, I was collecting some phonograph records of Hawaiian music, and I stuck them up on a shelf in my closet because I wasn't buying them to use them, I was buying them to take home eventually. Well, a few months, I noticed they were all warped and moldy, and my shoes got all moldy. It was really something that I wasn't quite used to and, although, I thought I came from a rainy country, but it was nothing like Hilo. It would rain every single day; but of course, it didn't rain too long, and then the sun would come out, and so you didn't realize that there was that much moisture around. So that was an interesting experience.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.