It was a Tuesday in June 1952, the day before Kamehameha Day, and we were in Punaluu. It may have been a day trip, or it might have been for a week.

Yes, that’s me, a couple of months short of 5 years old, sitting on my sister Bonnie’s lap. I’m don’t recall who the other two girls are. I’ll ask Bonnie to chime in with any info she recalls.

My mother carefully dated the photo and saved it in an album that was given to me years later.

I really have no specific recollections of this visit. I do know that one one of these Punaluu vacations, I ended up with a Portuguese man o’war wrapped around my arm and shoulder. That part, at least, is not a pleasant memory.

Click on the photo to see a larger version.

And Bonnie did respond with her own recollections.

The other two girls are Punahou school friends, Nancy Woffinden and Marla Ward.

Marla’s father was a (used?) car dealer. They lived in the big Tudor-style house still at corner of Kahala Ave and Hunakai, across from one of the walking accesses to Kahala beach. Nancy’s father was a weatherman, and we joked on the whole drive from Kahala to Punalu’u via Waipahu that he made a mistake and did not send us sunny weather.

We were spending the day with Auntie Emma and Uncle Gene Dunn who had a beachfront home in Punalu’u. These swings were in the front yard, placed for their own grandchildren whom I never knew. And yes, that was where we were likely to have up close encounters with Portuguese man-of-war. I am told they are different from, and less potent than, the box jelly fish. I am certain that we took a picnic lunch that day.

Auntie Emma and her sister Auntie Alice were schoolmates of our grandmother at the Priory. Our mother said she was an adult before she realized they were not blood family.

Auntie Alice was married to John C Lane, politician, friend of Prince Kuhio, and an original member of the Queen’s Guard who was later elected mayor of Honolulu. Yes, in 1893. The Lanes lived in the first beach house at the Ka’a’awa end of Punalu’u. If i remember correctly, the originally Pat’s at Punaluu was on the mauka side of the highway between the Dunn And the Lane homes. I remember a windbreak of ironwood trees on the right side of the Dunn lot (right if I was looking at the house from the highway), a large front yard, and a modest house set down close to the beach. There was a stone wall separating the front lawn from the highway, which (with the swings just behind the wall) was always my marker in finding the house.