Did you grow up with one of these?

The built-in ironing board in the kitchen was probably a welcomed architectural feature back in early 1942 when my parents bought this small 3-bedroom, 1-bath house measuring just under 1,000 square feet in Kahala.

The ironing board folded into it’s own small closet and could be hidden behind its own door, but was easily pulled out into place for use, which felt to me like it was very often.

The memory of it came back to me yesterday for some unknown reason, and I began to wonder whether this was a common feature of 1940-era Hawaii houses? Was this built-in a throwback or a modern convenience?

The house remained relatively unchanged over the 71 years my mother lived in it. The ironing board remained throughout. After my mom and dad were gone, Meda and I had the house rebuilt before moving here from Kaaawa, in part because it was old and a wreck, in part because we needed to make it different enough to discourage their ghosts from wandering the hallways. Yes, a joke, perhaps, but then again, a motive for making small changes. We rebuilt mostly in its original footprint, but enlarged by kitchen by pushing out the kitchen wall toward the street about six or eight feet. Our more modern sensibilities could not have dealt with a kitchen so small that there was no room even for a microwave oven, much less any of the other things that find their way into contemporary kitchens.

But while the house stayed the same, the neighborhood around it has changed dramatically, and not necessarily for the better.

Gone are the croton or panax hedges between homes along the street, which have motly been replaced by walls or tall fences. In the old days, you could just slip through the hedge to visit a neighbor. Now walls have largely severed connections between neighbors, something my mother was especially depressed about in her later years.

Our house now has walls on three sides, erected by those neighbors when they build large new homes. But in front, towards the street, we’re still happy to tell people to look for the house without a wall or gate in front, just a colorful hedge.

Back in the day, there were farms immediately behind the houses along this side of Kealaolu Avenue. Taylor’s chicken farm was just up the street at the corner of Farmers Road, and pig farms graced the interior of Kahala, further along Farmers Road in the direction of Diamond Head. On Kealaolu, many of the other existing homes were providing housing for war workers, and for those who serviced them, like the “working women” my dad said lived next door.

In any case, I had the good sense to take photos of each room of the house before the crew from Re-use Hawaii moved in and dismantled it, in preparation for our rebuild.

And so the image of the built-in ironing board is captured for posterity. There weren’t a lot of drawers for storage, so knives, cooking utensils, and a few pots graced the walls. Plastic and glass items on the floor were ready to be recycled. A basket hanging on the wall was where used plastic bags went, to be reused when needed. A plastic trash can sat in that same location for as long as I can remember. My earliest recollections were taking kitchen garbage out into the back yard where it was burned in a metal bin. That ended when the city started collecting trash and open air trash burning in the back yard became a thing of the past.

And we didn’t try to recreate the built-in ironing board. To tell the truth, neither of us have ironed anything in decades. We managed to avoid jobs where wrinkles were frowned on, and manage to shake enough of them out after washing and drying that we can get by, although perhaps with a bit more rumpled look than ironing might have achieved.

And if you’re wondering about the small plaque seen in those photos on the wall of my mother’s kitchen, it read: “Wonder Woman Works Here”.