Tag Archives: Helen Yonge Lind

Maui’s Keawakapu Beach a decade before the start of Wailea

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[text]Just when I think that we’ve located all the old photos in my parents’ home, along come some more. Yesterday my sister handed me an old shoe box with a jumble of things inside. Lens caps to long lost cameras. Empty Kodak 35mm film cans. Empty slide boxes. Then some gems. A few stacks of loose slides held in place by disintegrating rubber bands, along with several boxes as they would have been returned after being developed. Most of the slides carefully labeled in my mother’s careful handwriting. They were mixed up, products of several different trips to neighbor islands.

In a quick look yesterday afternoon, I pulled out a handful images from a family vacation Maui in mid-August 1960, several days on either side of my birthday, which falls on the 17th. These slides are 53 years old, and show their age. But the images still capture that earlier point of island history.

These were taken in the area of South Maui now site of the sprawling resorts and condominiums stretching from Wailea towards Makena. At that time, though, South Kihei Road was the end of the line. Beyond, towards Makena, it was pretty much a desert.

There are several photos of the Henry Baldwin home on Keawakapu Beach, and views from the beach, now in the middle of the Wailea resort area.

Wailea wasn’t conceived by the folks at Alexander and Baldwin for more than another decade.

One personal treasure–a photo at the Baldwin house in which I’m holding a large, orange cat. I was just turning 13 at the time. I don’t remember the incident or the cat, but it’s my earliest recorded feline interaction. Perhaps it had an effect?

–> See all of these photos of Keawakapu Beach in 1960

From Helen’s Scrapbook: Photos from the Kamehameha School for Girls

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Until 1931, the year my mother graduated, the Kamehameha School for Girls was located in the block bounded by Kalihi Street and North King Street across from the present site of Farrington High School.

Her scrapbook contains a number of photographs taken over several years from the late 1920s through to 1931. Most of them lack captions or notes, but they have a wonderful quality about them.

Here’s one of my mother with friends on the old campus. You can click to see a larger version of the photo.

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This photo came complete with my mother’s handwritten note that appears to have been appended years later, identifying some of the young women in the picture.

From left: Ellen Wittington, Helen Yonge, May Bradley, Bernice, Victoria Atchley, unknown, Rowena Buchanon. Names are from a handwritten note left by my mother.

In another photo from the Kamehameha Schools archive, “Atchley” is spelled “Acherly.”

May Bradley later married Thomas “Lofty” Cook, who served as the chair of the Hawaii County Board of Supervisors from 1959-1962, a position that had the powers later assigned to the mayor. She died in 2008 at age 93.

I recall visiting with Lofty and May Cook on several Big Island vacations when I was a kid, and one year our family stayed in their beach home in Kona during the time he was chair of the Supervisors. A note from my mother reminded me that on one trip, probably that one, we were given use of a county car. Old Hawaii, for sure.

Ellen Wittington’s sister, Elizabeth, married Wright Bowman, the legendary woodworker and canoe builder.

From my sister, Bonnie:

Frances Townsend in the back row was later Frances Lucas of Waimanalo. Tamar Mookini was Tamar Tavares of San Diego.

–> See all of these photos from the Kamehameha School for Girls in the years around 1928-31.

From Swanky Franky to backyard bomb shelters: More views of Hawaii in the 1940s

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Swanky FrankyI’m still coming across old photographs among my mother’s papers and making quick scans using my iPhone and an app called “CamScanner.” The results aren’t bad at all for sharing on the web.

This photo from 1940 shows my dad, John Lind, on the right, sitting in front of one of the Swanky Franky hot dog carts that gave brothers Cliff and Spence Weaver their start in the restaurant business. And I’m guessing those are the Weaver brothers with my dad in the picture.

My father came to Hawaii to take a job in the Honolulu office of San Francisco-based Dohrmann Hotel Supply Company. He was a good salesman, so it would have been natural to make friends with the Weaver brothers and other up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

This batch of photos ranges from Kahala to the University of Hawaii and back to downtown Honolulu on VJ Day.

–>See all of today’s gallery of old Hawaii photographs from my mother’s collection.

Sisters 1919 and 1984

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I had to stop when I ran into another photo of my mother and her sister, Marguerite.

Marguerite was a couple of years older. She’s the bigger girl in the top photo. She was seven. My mom was five.

1919

Marguerite left Hawaii before I was born and lived her adult life on the mainland, stopping in Arkansas before settling down in Nevada. I remember visiting her in Lovelock when I was a kid.

Sixty Five years later, another photo of the two sisters. This one carefully dated–May 23, 1984. In this photo, Marguerite looks diminutive next to my mother.

1984

We’ve learned that families are always complicated. In fact, complicated family relationships are par for the course, and these sisters were no exception. We’ll never know their whole story, unless there a “tell all” diary stashed somewhere waiting to be discovered. It’s probably just as well.

Two weeks after my mother’s death and we’re still in limbo. You can’t begin dealing with the legalities of death until the Department of Health is able to deliver copies of the official death certificate. These are needed to do everything–retrieve assets, check bank accounts, transfer property title, and on and on. The mortuary warned that the state usually takes 2-3 weeks, and it looks like they’ll take the full three weeks in this case.

It’s all a learning experience, I suppose.

The reality of death has only hit home at odd moments.

This morning we ran into a friend on our walk. She stopped to express her sympathy, and we exchanged the usual small talk. I shrugged, it is what it is, inevitable.

Then Meda said, “We called her The Woman Who Knows Everything. And she did.”

And somehow that triggered a wave of loss that seemed to sweep over and past me and, for a very long second, left me alone and adrift in a empty mental space. We did regularly call on The Woman Who Knows Everything for her esoteric knowledge about Hawaii, history, family, life. She was always there, and almost always had an answer. In that brief moment, triggered by that sense memory, this new sense of loss overwhelmed. They we walked on, leaving our friend to go on her separate way, and the moment passed.