One of my dad’s high school friends dropped by our house with his wife in 1963, more than 30 years after they had graduated from Wilson High School in Long Beach.
Myron Brejcha and my dad remained lifelong friends, and managed to stay in touch throughout their lives. At the time of this visit, I was in high school, while ny dad and the Brejchas were turning 50.
When I recently stumbled across the 1963 photos, I thought it would be interesting to match them with others taken in the last couple of years.
On each page, 1963 is on the left, and the recent photos on the right.
In 2015, after my parents had passed away, Meda and I supervised a major renovation of the house while attempting to keep it within the same footprint and with the same feel.
Some things remain the same. For example, the giant Bird of Paradise just to the left of our front door is still there, much older and wiser now. And other photos show it was already higher than the roofline by the early 1950s.
Other things have changed, though. The coconut trees are gone. You can see there were coconuts on the two front corners of the hard, fronting Kealaolu Avenue, and several more across the back of the yard, and for a while one on either side of the lanai. But two things happened. The trees grew and their roots began causing problems like cracks in the concrete floor of the old lanai. More importantly, the cost of keeping the trees trimmed increased dramatically over time. So my mother slowly had them removed over a few years, a painful decision for her.
The panax hedges separating the house from the neighbors on either side have been replaced by walls, much to my mother’s dismay. This meant an end to just stepping through the space in the hedge to join a neighbor for a cup of coffee or glass of beer.
And although my parents enjoyed their ground-level covered lanai with a few stairs down from the house, we chose to replace it with a deck at the same level as the living room floor, so that you now slide open the deck doors and step right onto the lanai.
In any case, enjoy these two views of our home in Kahala.
