Decades ago, we were in Boston for one of Meda’s academic conferences. It was likely 1995 when the American Society of Criminology met there in Boston. We walked around quite a bit, and several blocks from the Boston Commons we spotted an antique shop. This wasn’t not one of those upscale stores with everything clean and polished and high priced, but the kind with rows of dusty things in piles, in boxes, and under foot. We had fun scouring the store, and then spotted an oil painting of a Hawaii scene on the wall.

The scene depicted Pearl Harbor in the distance, storm clouds overhead, and in the foreground the Sumida family’s watercress farm, with their fields running down to the shoreline. The farm has been credited with growing two-thirds of HaawaIt was a great find!

The painting was signed “Joe Voges, 1945.”

After a little haggling, it was ours. I don’t remember anything about the flight home, so we must have found a way to stuff it into an overhead bin. And it occupied a central spot on the wall in our living room in our Kaaawa for over 20 years.

I tried several times to locate the artist, and failed. Then in mid-2003, I made another round of phone calls. This time, Bingo!

Here’s my description originally posted here in May 2003.

My search for Joe Voges, the artist who created the 1945 painting of Sumida Farms that we found a number of years ago, ended late yesterday morning with a phone call to a Nebraska City phone number. I had tried calling this particular Joe Voges before, but that phone number was no longer valid, and it took me a while to catch on that the latest Google search results included a different number.

I’ve made a bunch of calls like this before, explaining my interest in a Joe Voges who was in Hawaii at the end of World War II. I admit to making a basic error, focusing on finding Voges on the east coast because we had found the painting in Boston. But after posting the comments yesterday, I made another run at less likely prospects like this number in Nebraska.

This time the answer was immediate. “That’s me,” the voice on the phone said.

So here’s the story. Voges, now 90, was stationed in an administrative unit at Pearl Harbor for two years. While here, he took up painting. “I never took any lessons or anything,” he said.

According to Voges, he didn’t paint very much. “I sold a few, and I brought five home..Mostly oils. And I did a few watercolors. ”

He recalls the Sumida Farms picture, and another from the top of Kole Kole Pass, looking down on the clouds. He also painted a Hawaiian couple fishing, with their catch carried in a banana leaf basket. Then there was one looking out to see from up in the mountains with a fleet of Navy ships offshore.

He said he gave one of those watercolors to a friend, a view of Makalapa headquarters of Admiral Nimitz. He said it’s still rolled up in a drawer somewhere.

Home for Voges has always been Nebraska City, down in the Southeastern corner of Nebraska. Voges said he was born there and returned there after leaving the Navy.

Voges has been in the taxidermy business for 60 years, and says he did some taxidermy for friends while stationed at Pearl Harbor. He even did his thing on several fish caught during fishing expeditions while in Hawaii, and took some back to Nebraska. Taxidermy was tough during the war because materials were hard to get.

“You had to just scrounge for everything,” he said.

Voges said he didn’t continue painting after returning to Nebraska, although he has painted backdrops for his taxidermy subjects, and contributed to a mural by the local artists guild created for a natural history museum in Nebraska City which he is supporting.

Voges said his whole collection, including items from his lifetime of taxidermy as well as his paintings, is going to end up in the museum. “I want it to be part of the community,” he said, adding proudly, “the third oldest in the state.”

He closed his store just a couple of years ago, but still lives on the property. He’s single, never married.

It’s a good thing that I made the call. Voges said he has been fighting pneumonia and just got out of the hospital. And he enjoyed learning that the Sumida family and others have admired his work from so many years ago.

“I found this call very interesting,” he said just before our conversation ended. So did I, so did I.

Voges died in Nebraska City on Christmas Eve in 2012 at age 99.

Then, as we were thinning our art collection in preparation for moving to Kahala, we were looking at this prize painting, and decided that it should go “home.” Back to Sumida Farm, that is.

A couple of phone calls later, we drove out and made our way to the on-site office of Sumida Farm, and presented the painting to Barbara and David Sumida, the siblings who shared management of the farm at that time. Several other photos and paintings of the farm graced the office walls, so Joe Voges work was welcomed as an addition to the family.

So with all that as background, I was very glad to see the news that Kamehameha School agreed to an extention of the land lease for Sumida Farm. KITV reported the lease extension on Tuesday. The renewal extends the lease on the ten acre farm out to 2045, with an option for an additional 10-year. Literally a new lease on life for the little farm that dates back to 1928.