Yes, the video is terrible. But the story is interesting.
On Thanksgiving, just before we faded into a food coma, I looked across the wreckage of the meal and asked my mother a few questions about the “old days”.
My mom is 96, turns 97 next May, and she graduated in the Kamehameha of 1931.
My iPhone video is out of focus. Her memory is not.
I asked about the Kamehameha Schools song contest, which is featured in a current set of broadcast ads. She responded, and added some comments about Kamehameha’s suppression of most things Hawaiian at the time.
Click for the video. Transcript follows.
Q: Did they have a song contest back when you were there?
It was only the girls. It wasn’t coeducational in my day. They were separate schools. There was the boys school, on the campus of Bishop Museum. THere was a preparatory school, an elementary school for boys, but no elementary school for girls, and that was where Farrington High School is. Add the girls school was on the Makai side of King Street, facing, now, Farrington High School.
Farrington was not built until…
Q: Where the housing is now?
All that housing, the whole block down, was the girls school. It was a big, big campus.
Q: Until when?
1931. I was in the last class that graduated from that school. The next September, the girls school had moved mauka. It was the first one there, the boys school didn’t move for a number of years.
The song contest. DIfferent girls classes competed. We didn’t have anything with the boys.
Q: Did they teach Hawaiian then?
Everything Hawaiian was suppressed.
Q: Even hula?
You weren’t allowed to speak Hawaiian, you weren’t allowed to dance the hula. But you could sing Hawaiian, because that’s what the tourists wanted, and they brought tourists to… But they educated you, we used to say, to be “good little haole servants.”
They taught you housekeeping, waiting on tables, cooking, and they..when I went to the university, I found I didn’t have any knowledge of what I should have had in math. we just didn’t have any. It was “arithmetic”. They didn’t prepare you the way schools are supposed to prepare you today. Just housekeeping.
Q: How many people went to college?
I don’t know. Not very many.
I don’t know when they started the coeducational, I’m not sure. The first girls on the mauka campus were still segregated, and I don’t know how many years later the boys finally moved up there. Then they put in an elementary school, coeducational. Up there. Everything is up mauka now.
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the emotional and cultural complexities of the territorial period have really been underexplored as though the impact it has had on the psyche of the Hawaiian people is somehow less significant than that the one infamous day in January of 1893. thank you for exploring this topic with your mother and sharing her memories with the world.
Please, MORE MORE MORE of Helen and her memories before they vanish and we are at a loss.
Ian, these are treasures , priceless and so enduring.
Big mahalo to you all.
i agree with 8toomuch111.
Wonderful interview…would love to hear more of her stories of life back in “the day”. Yes, they are truly treasures.
On Saturday, February 5, 2011, the Fourth World Wetlands Day will be celebrated again at Kawainui Marsh.
The half day’s activities will include a Talk Story Session with individuals born in the twenties & early thirties sharing their memories growing up in Windward O`ahu before statehood – and even before World War II.
Much more informaion to come on the entire event, but in addition to the above, we plan on having free walking and (small) bus tours, exhibits by at least a dozen non-profit cultural, educational and environment organizations, entertainment, food, a native Hawaiian plant sale & other vendors, Hawaiian games for the keiki, and a very special ceremony celebrating the International Wetlands 2011 theme.
Again, mark your calendars and plan to drop by to listen to what it was like “back in the day.”
Excellent entry and comments. There is a badly missing emphasis on Hawaii’s amazing history and its impact on modern times. Way too many news stories, from virtually all news sources, make zero mention of history’s role in current problems.
We need a high-quality, objective TV series that revisits Hawaii history in depth, covering more than Esme and broadcasting something more important than fishing, football, surfing and shopping! Yes, history is already in the books, but I recommend TV (and not Olelo) to catch more people’s interest and attention. I’d love it, but only if it stays objective.
Wonderful Ian. When I was there in the 70s it was still kind of like that. I was the only one of my friends to take Hawaiian language because it was considered unuseable back then, so they all took Japanese so they could work in the hotels. I was in the secretarial program and took typing, shorthand and transcription. The boys took shop so they could be mechanics, carpenters, etc. And they used to say back then (and maybe it’s still true) that Kamehameha made firemen and cops. Going to college was not stressed at all and few of us went.
“You weren’t allowed to speak Hawaiian, you weren’t allowed to dance the hula. But you could sing Hawaiian, because that’s what the tourists wanted, and they brought tourists to… But they educated you, we used to say, to be “good little haole servants.”
They taught you housekeeping, waiting on tables, cooking, and they..when I went to the university, I found I didn’t have any knowledge of what I should have had in math. we just didn’t have any. It was “arithmetic”. They didn’t prepare you the way schools are supposed to prepare you today. Just housekeeping.”
This is so profound. Are the ‘good little haole servants’ symbolic of the ‘jobs, jobs, jobs” of today’s developers’ rally cry?
Good evening!
First off, I commend you for capturing these memories. It’s important and valuable information. My great grand aunt (the sister of my great grandfather) taught at the Kamehameha School for Girls some time between about 1910 until about 1937.
I would be curious to know if your Mom had any of the history of the history written down or any images that she or you would be willing to share. Anna Mary Reid (My great Aunt) is a bit of a mystery. I’m trying to piece together her fascinating story little by little, but she went to the four corners of the Earth (teaching in Hawaii, then spending about four or five years in Paris before returning to the Midwest) She didn’t marry or have any children, so there didn’t seem to be much record of her. That’s why anything that might be lingering over in an archive or in the memory of our treasured seniors would be helpful. Thanks again – this helps to fill in the zeitgeist of that era.
Jarrod