Tag Archives: Helen Yonge Lind

Two 1950s views

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My mother, Helen Lind, took these photos in the 1950s, probably around 1956.

Diamond Head appears in the background of both.

You can click on either photo to see a larger and more detailed version.

The top photo appears to be taken from Round Top Drive looking down over the University of Hawaii campus and beyond to Diamond Head.

For comparison purposes, click here for a more contemporary view from about the same vantage point.

1950s photo

The bottom photo looks back towards Diamond Head from the other direction. It’s taken from the slopes of Koko Head, looking back over what is now Hawaii Kai but then was scattered farms and homes. Note that it was also before homes were built up the mountains.

1950s photo

A portrait of my mom at (almost) 98

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Here’s a portrait of my mom, Helen Yonge Lind, taken at our home in Kaaawa yesterday, Easter Sunday.

She turns 98 in five weeks, and is doing pretty well, all things considered.

We were just at the end of lunch. She’s framed by the handle on an Easter basket set in the middle of the table. The ears on the Easter Bunny PEZ dispenser, which Meda found a while back while prowling thrift shops, protrude from the bottom of the photo.

Helen

For you camera fans, this was taken with my new Canon S100. ISO speed 320, f/4.5, 1/30 second, available light indoors. Medium telephoto, equivalent of about 72mm.

My mother establishes a UH scholarship fund

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I drove my mother, Helen Yonge Lind, up to University of Hawaii Foundation offices on the Manoa campus yesterday morning where she signed the final paperwork to establish a small scholarship fund to support nontraditional students in the UH system.

There was a time when she wanted to go back to school and couldn’t afford it. The Yonge-Cathcart Scholarship Fund is named for her grandfather, Robert William Cathcart, and her mother, Heleualani Yonge. Cathcart put his daughters through school at the Priory in Honolulu. Lani, who later was a school teacher, continued his emphasis on education by supporting my mother and her sister through their years at UH.

My mom graduated in the UH Class of 1935 with a degree in Home Economics, and worked in the department until after the start of WWII. In those days, there was no such thing as a scholarship. You took out loans to go to school. She hopes this scholarship will help other women and Hawaiians to return to further their educations.

We were welcomed by Malia Peters, the foundations director of scholarship development, and her staff, along with Rockne Freitas, UH VP for student affairs and university and community relations.

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We were in Bachman Hall, and I asked my mother, who turns 97 in just six weeks, what had been in that location during her time at UH. She didn’t have to think long.

[text]“This was the gym,” she quickly recalled. “Not this building, but the gym was here.”

The swimming pool was located just a short distance above the gym, below what is now the Campus Center. She was a member of the first UH women’s swim team in 1934. The photo is is from the UH yearbook, Ka Palapala. I know there’s at least one other picture that I’ve scanned from this period, but I haven’t found it this morning.

Rockne was interested in hearing that my mom graduated from Kamehameha School for Girls in 1931, the year before the school moved up the heights to its current location. She is reportedly the only surviving member of that class, and perhaps the oldest surviving graduate of Kamehameha, although I haven’t tried to confirm that.

Kamehameha School for GIrls–“Everything Hawaiian was suppressed”

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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.