Here’s one of those “small world” experiences.

Last week, I posted this photo of my dad and a couple of friends dating back to the early 1940s. I had little info about it except that it was among a batch of photos from someone else’s wedding they were attending.

When I showed it to my dad, he reacted immediately. “That’s Billy Brooks, he was a great guy,” he said. Slowly, repeating. “A great guy.” But he couldn’t dredge much else out of his memory, at least not at that moment.

Days later, I showed the same picture to my mother. “Oh, that’s Marion and Billy Brooks.”

Then she said Billy died at a young age in an accident, and Marion later remarried.

“Her name is Sanderling,” she said, and mentioned they have seen each other from time to time.

That name reminded me of something. Luckily, when I checked my iPhone, an old note in a contact list transferred from some long-ago Palm was still there.

It pointed to Vickie and Bill Reisner, who rented part of a house across the street from us in Kaaawa for a while, back quite a few years now. At some point it had come up that her mother, whose name is Sanderling, had been friends with my parents. I wrote that down at the time, and the note survived.

They moved back into town, but we still run into Vickie because she’s director of volunteer and visitor services at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Bill & Vickie are listed in the phone book, so I gave them a call and sent a link to the photo. As luck would have it, her mother was there with them at the time.

Vicki later responded:

My mother was thrilled, and she said Johnny Lind was such a handsome man. I agree, very handsome. Then she went on about her first husband Billy Brooks who is the other man in the photo. Thank you so much for sending it. We really love it. I think Billy and your dad were good friends.

It just goes to show that Hawaii is still a small town in many ways.