Category: Life

Sometimes it pays to be old.

You’ve lived it, you’ve seen it, you’ve done it.

Life means a keg load of memories.

I turned 80 today. You read that right. The Eighty is Weighty Club.

So what if the body aches are constant; that it requires effort to get off the sofa; that the hair, if still there, has whitened. All part of aging.

So what? You have fond memories. Try these on for sighs…an alphabetical compilation of people, places and things, from A to Z, to tingle the memory bell:

A – Arakawa’s. The picturesque department store in the sugar cane town of Waipahu. Its shopping bag, replicating the blue palaka print, was a treasure.

B—Brothers Cazimero. One of the founding members of the renaissance of Hawaiian music. Robert still carries on the tradition of preserving and performing the music; bro Roland has gone on to a heavenly career and presence.

C—Char Hung Sut. Known for its char siu bao and chow fun. Shut down for good. Auwe.

D — Drive-in theaters. Yeah, dating-time destination. Even with those awful audio gizmos you had to hang on the car window.

E—Escalators. Sears Roebuck, on Beretania St., had the first moving stairs.

F—Foodland. When there was only one, well before the advent of Foodland Farms.

G—Gabby Pahihui. The first God of slack key guitar. Think “Hi‘ilawe.”

H—“Hawaii Aloha.” The anthem of choice to close an event, with hands-upon-hands and voices in union. A unifier.

I—Israel Kamakawiwio‘ole, when he was a member of The Makaha Sons of Niihau. Before “Over the Rainbow.”

J—Jack in the box. When it was mostly a toy, with “Jack” jumping out of a music box you cranked.

K—Kress stores. The foremost five-and-dime outlet. Debatable: Was Woolworth’s the dime store fave?

L—Lurline. The flagship that brought visitors from the mainland to Hawaii, when sailing preceded air flights for the wealthy.

M—Movies.  With Cinemascope and Surround Sound. And remember 3-D?  And movie palaces, like the original Waikiki, Kuhio, and Princess Theatres?

N—“No ka oi.” The useful Hawaiian term to designate “the best.” Worked the; still works today.

O—Olomana. The duo named after a mountain, with pioneering musicians Jerry Santos and Robert Beaumont; the latter died far too early.

P — Phones, with cords and rotary dials; later, in booths, providing Superman a space to change costumes. The booth vanished with the invention of cellular phones.

Q—Queen’s Hospital. When it was a modest facility in pretty much the area where its stellar medical campus is located.

R—Roadshows, movie films with anticipated long runs, with premium, reserved seating, intermissions. Think: “Cleopatra,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Bridge Over the River Kwai. Add: powerhouse movies that ran for months, with long lines before mall theaters and stadium seating: “Sound of Music,” “Jaws,” “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

S—Shaka. The thumb and pinkie finger that say many things for many moments. The simple definition: “Right on.” Thanks, Lippy Espinda, who popularized the signal.

T—Typewriters. The tool that enabled you to insert paper and spool of ribbon, and learn the rhythm of the keyboard, to “write” your term papers.

U—University of Hawaii. It enabled many of us to get college degrees without trekking to the mainland; its agricultural roots have grown to embrace a medical school and a very healthy travel-industry school.

V—Videotape. The early way to film, tape shows on TV, before the arrival of DVRs and iPhones.

W—Waikiki. Love it or loathe it, there wouldn’t be an industry that welcomes visitors without Waikiki. Think Moana Hotel, the first lodging for tourists on now the fabled Kalakaua Avenue.

X—Xerox machines. Consequently, messy mimeograph devices and carbon paper became outdated.

Y—Yasai man. The peddler-on-wheels who visited communities to sell produce, meat, milk and other needs for daily lives.

Z—Zippy’s. When there was only one, on King Street. Now, there two dozen, with Las Vegas becoming home for Zip-Min, Zip-Pac and fried chicken, too.

Back in the day, markets like Foodland, Times and Safeway didn’t exit. Perhaps Piggly Wiggly was around, but not readily accessible for most communities.

Thus, neighborhoods relied on mini-markets-on-wheels. The yasai man (yasai is Japanese for vegetables) used to make the rounds, a predecessor of food trucks. The visits could have been once or twice a week, depending on the community and the vendor.

Unlike today’s food trucks, these vehicles were laden with staples and treats. Pre-cooked meals were not part of the offerings.

My mom, and occasionally, my grandma, would come out of the apartment when the truck rolled into the driveway, usually with a blasting-horn signal. We lived in Liliha, then in the Kapalama area, and these merchants on wheels visited both locales.

The guy announced his arrival with horn-honking. Many apartment doors would fling open, and yes, the store came to you, not the other way around.

The offerings were included fresh catch of the day, like fish; deli staples like bologna (remember bologna sandwiches) or farm-to-table greens like lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes or watercress.

The vendor usually was self-employed, and traveled via a truck with a pull-up side, rear,or if his was a big truck, both sides, so customers could see his wares. Steak or pork chops? Maybe char siu? Hmmm, dessert like slices of pies?  Lots to ogle and examine.

Normally, a hanging scale was part of the yasai man’s necessities, to weigh potatoes or

onions. Prices were hand-scribbled; the guy used those ol’ pink market-style paper to wrap some of the meat purchases.

If I remember, some families were able to arrange “credit,” with the vendor logging your tab in tablets, assuming you’d pay up at the next visit. Cash was the desired payment form; no checks, nor plastic.

Kids used to show u to ogle the candy treats. Milk Duds. Nestle’s snow-capped chocolates. Maybe packets of Juicy Fruit gum.

Don’t remember if the options included single-bottles of Coke or Pepsi but Orange Crush was available. (Aluminum cans were not yet born, so there weren’t bottle-recycling fees).

Ice cream was iffy; some vendors didn’t have a proper freezer installed in his van.

If a special occasion was coming up, mom could order a fresh chicken (head still on, legs dangling) or — a treat! – a couple of steaks for pan-frying or hibachi grill, for the vendor’s visit next week.

And so it was – a few precious moments when the store wheeled its way into your life.

Remember?

As youths in high school, a summertime job meant raising some bucks for college.

Back in the day, summers for most juniors and seniors meant a job at Hawaiian Pine, which later became Dole Cannery, in Iwilei.

Besides Dole, there was Libby’s. And Del Monte. Canneries depended on youthful hires when school was out. And Dole’s mammoth water tank, in the shape of a gigantic pineapple, dominated the Iwilei spectrum and could be seen from airline flights and from elevated Honolulu homes until tall condos blocked the views.

Girls customarily worked as packers, getting itchiness because of the acidity of fresh pineapple in the process of packing pineapple in tins.

Boys commonly had warehouse jobs, lifting boxes onto stacks on skips, prepping for delivery. I had a job in shipping – a checker – monitoring the skips.

Some youths even spent summers harvesting the pines on the farms on Molokai or Lanai. Tough job, hot days, physically challenging. It was grueling, until payday.

Perhaps over the next decade or so, summers for many meant seasonal jobs at McDonald’s.

These days, however, kids have a thing about working at fast food outlets. So nowadays, many adults fill the ranks of cooking burgers and breakfast items or cashiering at the front counters.

So what was your summer job? Loved it or loathed it?

As a youth growing up, schools offered what was called a typing class, where you learned how to type on a typewriter. OK, if you don’t know what a typewriter is (because it’s obsolete now), ask your parents or grandparents.

If you knew how to type, you needed that typewriter as well as paper to insert, to see the fruits of your work.

In more recent eras, kids who wanted to type took keyboarding classes, to master the art of typing, not on a typewriter but on a computer keyboard. With keyboarding, of course, there’s no paper and the result of your input is displayed on the computer screen.

Typewriters were replaced by computers over the decades.

But there are precise memories of learning typing the old way.

If you took typing lessons, you surely remember the ubiquitous  sentence you had to master on your typewriter.  Over and over.

That sentence was The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, an English-language pangram—a sentence that contains all of the letters of the English alphabet.

If you could repeatedly type that, at a speed of, say 65 words per minute, you’d be somewhat of a master. Without making a typo(mistake).

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

It was redundant, but necessary, to take ownership and conquer the keyboard.

And reflecting on the typewriter: if you made an error, you could erase it with a circular eraser attached with a brush; you needed a inked fabric ribbon to “print” your texts; if you had a deluxe ribbon, you could type in black and red ink; you had to return your carriage, to progress from one line to the next.

If you didn’t learn the five-finger way to type, you probably do the one finger-two hand hunt and peck system.

What memories, good or bad, do you have about the trysts of

typing? …