A Hawaii Story for the Inauguration: Part II of IV

Where you went to high school was everything in Hawaii.  And sometimes when I decided to walk to the University from our apartment,  I’d reflect on this.

Behind my back as I set up, high up on the mountains was Kamehameha, the private school for Hawaiians that had been set up in the nineteenth century and that was always embroiled in controversy and scandal about the use of the Bishop Estate money (this went to the Supreme Court) and whether or not it provided a quality education for Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians.

I was going east though and as I came down over the slope of Punchbowl (an extinct volcanic crater and home to the National Cemetary of the Pacific, a heart stopping place), I came upon the bleachers of McKinley High School.  McKinley High School was the public high school of Hawaii, a state that traditionally was (and still) is full of private schools.

McKinley was the school that propelled children of plantation workers into politics and the professions.  From the 1920s to the late 1940s,  before Hawaii was a state, its principal Miles Carey inspired by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, taught the children (43% Japanese, 20% Chinese, 11% Hawaiian or part Hawaiian, 10% haole–roughly white–and 4% Portuguese) that they could go beyond cutting cane and canning pineapple, insisting they could be leaders, they did not have to take vocational classes, they could study literature and foreign languages, they could go to college.

It was not a popular agenda with the Territorial Government.  Some derided the school as Tokyo High.  But a visitor from the Frick Foundation in Pittsburgh declared it the best thing he had seen educationally outside the United States. And for the children of plantation workers it opened the door to opportunity.  By 1928 well over half the graduates were doing graduate work of some kind.  One of those who went through McKinley was now Senator Daniel Inouye.

But on I marched, getting a bit sweaty in the Honolulu heat.  And then I passed the campus of Punahou (POON-A-HOE) School.  It was an island of calm and elegance amidst the apartment buildings and frame houses of the pleasant if slightly cluttered middle class suburb of Makiki. Nnightblooming Cereus tumbled over the school walls, inside were palm trees, manicured grass, fantastic facilities, imposing buildings.

I’ve posted on Punahou before.  And here’s another link that describes its Carnival (this is the only food bit in this part of the story but the next part will be all food). It’s the 10,000 pound gorilla of schools in Hawaii, the oldest private school west of the Rockies, endowment of over $100 million (at least until the economic crisis), that subsidizes the students and gives scholarships because the fees run about $17,000 a year.    Originally founded for the children of the missionaries since Statehood in 1959 it has become completely multiracial (I’d bet one of the most multiracial schools in the US).  Great teachers, great facilities, fast track to prestige colleges on the mainland.  I remember seeing a Hawaii-looking girl in a tiny cramped elevator of Harvard’s Widener Library and asking “Did you go to Punahou?”  “Yes,” she said.  “How do you know? That I’ve come from Hawaii?  And from Punahou? I’ve been so surprised that people in Boston don’t know about Punahou.” Well, now they do.

And then, dripping sweat by now, I crossed the road and was on to the campus of the University of Hawaii founded as a Land Grand Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1907.   And in one of the original buildings, elegant if termite infested building, my students trouped in.   None from Punahou, few from McKinley.  There did seem to be an awful lot though from Wahiawa (WAH-HEE-WAH).

So one day when I had no classes, I hopped in the car and drove out to Wahiawa, perhaps 20 miles from the University.  Wahiawa is a little plantation town, small sagging frame houses, slippers (flipflops) lined up outside the doors, washing machines in the garage.  Wahiawa is smack in the middle of a plain between the two mountain ranges that run across the island.  On the lower part of the plain where there is more rain and irrigation water the cane fields still stretched out (they’ve gone now).  On the upper part where it is dryer the pineapple fields stretched out with pineapples lined up like little bayonets in grey threatening lines (they’ve gone now too).

Working cane is hard.  Probably working pine is harder, though who am I to say?  The field workers swathed themselves in layers of clothing against the sharp spines, added heavy leather gloves, goggles, and scarves wrapped around the head.   They looked like  workers kitted out to enter a nuclear plant in meltdown.  This in 90 degree heat.  And the red dust.  In my geology days I went down coal mines and came out black.  With a bit of scrubbing that black rubbed off.  The red dust of the pineapple fields did not rub off, it stained the skin, it stained the clothes, it got in every nook and cranny of the houses. And in the days before statehood, when plantation workers had no hope of a car, the cool waters of the islands’ beaches, the swaying palm trees, might as well have been on another planet.

So that was where my students’ roots lay.  And Wahiawa High School, started as a branch of McKinley, was their ticket out.  And many of them, as we shall see, took it.

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