The Count, Alexander Ilyich Rostov, made many friends during his long stay at the Metropol: Arkady at the front desk; Velentina in housekeeping; Pasha and Petya, the bellhops; Vasily, the hotel concierge; Fatima Federova, the hotel florist; all the restaurant employees; and of course, Marina, the seamstress, who was such an asset to the Count’s “daughter,” Sofia through the years.
The seamstresses that I saw daily, working in the glassed-in room behind the Napua Hotel lobby desk, were managed by Mrs. Kaneshiro’s sister, whose name I believe was Lorraine. She was taller than her sister, a stylish brunette, slim like a model, and very poised. A beauty, I might add. Lorraine employed rows of seamstresses and ran her fashion business from the hotel.
Those characters from the Metropol caused me to look back on Napua Hotel employees in Honolulu in 1959. It’s March, and we’ve lived in the hotel for nearly a month now. Like Sofia, who at 13 was “an expert at subterfuge” in the Metropol, moving about the hotel and discovering things, I too, at age 11, was becoming an expert at learning more about how our Napua Hotel was run.
We had met Mrs. Kaneshiro, the hotel manager, when we first moved in. Actually, she and her husband, Mr. Kaneshiro, were the co-owners. I overheard that he was a highly esteemed local physician. I was beginning to understand the details and intricacies of this Japanese family’s connections.
But, more importantly to me, I also discovered that the secretive painter who worked every evening in the lobby, after Mrs. Kaneshiro departed, was her brother, and also Lorraine’s brother, a man named Charlie Higa. During the day, Charlie Higa was a local high school art teacher. On weekday evenings, he was the night clerk. I learned this through social osmosis, listening in as other hotel guests spoke.
The Higa family intrigue was all beginning to make more sense to me. This was a closely-knit family, looking out for one another, helping each other to succeed. After hearing gossip from Mrs. Hedger on school day afternoons when my sisters and I played Canasta with her, and as I hung out on evenings in the hotel lobby watching Charlie Higa paint, I began to put these puzzle pieces together.
Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov was sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in 1922, the year the Soviet Union came into being. I moved into the Napua Hotel in 1959, the year the United States accepted Hawaii as its 50th state, completing our nation.
On March 12th, 1959, at 10:04 a.m., Hawaiian Standard Time, Hawaiians learned that the United States House of Representatives had voted that day to approve the resolution already approved by the United States Senate the previous day, March 11th, to make Hawaii a state. Bedlam broke out everywhere in Hawaii. If Hawaiian citizens voted to approve the conversion of Hawaii from a territory to a state—which they most certainly would, and did, the following August—Hawaiians would achieve their long-desired dream of statehood.
That day, a Thursday, I was still attending 6th grade at Kaahumanu Elementary. It just so happened that a photographer from “Paradise” magazine had chosen to visit our school to record the “spontaneous” outbreak of enthusiasm from the elementary school students when the anticipated statehood confirmation vote was approved.
Our school principal, along with principals throughout the Territory, must have known in advance what they were going to do on this joyous occasion: send all the students home for a celebratory vacation.
And so, with the photographer from “Paradise” stationed in front of the school awaiting a mass outpouring of students, Miss Tom gathered our 6th grade class in the school‘s main hallway, while other teachers bunched their younger students behind us. When the school bell sounded, we all bolted out the front doors of the school in an organized frenzy heading for a two-day vacation and a black and white photograph that would capture that moment in time, but only if you bought the magazine, which my mother, Verlie, luckily did. (The Caucasian boy in the striped shirt in the very center of the picture below is this author.)
I must admit that during my “sentence” in the Napua Hotel, I did have much more freedom than did The Count. I was allowed to leave our hotel room and the two-and-a-half acres of grounds to attend a nearby school on weekdays. At first, evenings did bring a sense of confinement. But just as The Count, lead by Nina, overcame his sense of confinement by exploring passageways in the Metropol, even discovering a secret passageway from his “cell” to a private room, I discovered my own “room” that, over the ensuing months brought me life-altering discoveries. That “room” was the hotel lobby, and my Nina was a twenty-six-year-old man named Charlie Higa.
One evening in March, as I was sitting quietly in the hotel lobby listening to a musical soundtrack, Charlie finally spoke to me.
“What’s your name?”
“Ron Powers.”
“I’m Charlie,” he said. He had finally broken the ice. Looking back now, knowing that Charlie was a high school teacher (the picture of him that I posted earlier in this essay was taken from a high school yearbook that I found on the internet), I assume the last thing he wanted to contend with at the end of his school day, especially while working evenings at a part-time job as the hotel’s night clerk, was having to deal with one more student when all he really wanted to do was paint.
But the ice had been broken. And so, we began to talk with one another while he painted. As a hotel employee, he of course knew who my mother was, and he assumed I was the brother of the two girls he saw me with when we went to visit Mrs. Hedger. Soon he learned that I had a younger brother, Mark, and that my step-father was in the navy and was out to sea much of the time, and that we were from the state of Washington, and that I was in the 6th grade at Kaahumanu Elementary, and much more.
As our evening conversations continued over the following days and weeks, I felt more comfortable moving forward in the lobby to sit closer to where Charlie painted. I could see his watercolors more easily, and I was closer to the stereo where the Broadway musicals and movie soundtracks continued to be played every night. He could tell that I was genuinely interested in his music, and so he would tell me the stories that went with each album. I also earned the honor of being able to hold the album covers and to read the liner notes myself. In time, I memorized the lyrics of my favorite songs and looked forward to hearing them, on a rotating basis of course, because there were so many albums to listen to. These were some of my favorites:
“Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains….”
“Time goes by, or do we? Close your eyes, and you’ll see….”
“Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes….”
In a very short time, I developed a love of musicals, an appreciation that changed me. Charlie didn’t treat me like I was a child. We talked about music, art, stories, life.
As my friendship with Charlie developed, I couldn’t wait to get home from school each day, to do my chores, eat dinner, clear the table, wash the dishes or dry them (if it was my turn), and then ask Mom if I could go down to the lobby to visit with Charlie. I don’t remember her ever saying no. She did remind me, however, to mind my manners, to not pester him, to not get in his way, to not ask too many questions. “I will. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t!”
One day, I think it was in April, Charlie asked my mother if she would allow him take me out for dinner and to a movie on one of his free nights when he wasn’t working, usually a weekend when other employees filled in at the hotel. Mom said yes, as long as I wasn’t kept out too late.
Charlie and I walked to a nearby Japanese restaurant, my first, where he ordered food for both of us. I can’t remember everything he ordered, but I do remember that we had an order of tempura shrimp, something I hadn’t eaten before. I thought it was delicious. After dinner, it was still light out when we walked to a neighborhood movie theater to see a Japanese samurai film. Charlie explained to me that samurais were like American cowboys in Japanese culture. I think he thought I should experience a part of his culture since he was sharing so much of mine with me each evening.
I remember jumping in my seat many times during the movie because this Japanese film was so different from American films. The Japanese director used quick edits to surprise the audience, and I mean quick. I had never been so jolted by a movie as I was by this first samurai film. It was filled with “quick cuts,” literally and figuratively. If my mother had known what kind of movie I was going to see, she might not have given me permission. I certainly didn’t tell her much about it when I got home that evening, just sharing that it was a Japanese “western.” Enough said, I thought.
Not to be outdone, Charlie’s sister, Lorraine, the fashion designer who ran the seamstress shop in the back of the Napua Hotel, decided to ask my mother if she could take my sisters Gema and Paula out to dinner at a nearby restaurant. They came home starry eyed, raving about the Japanese food that Lorraine had introduced them to.
We were getting to be quite the celebrities at the Napua Hotel! Other dinner outings, and for me, samurai movies, followed over the ensuing weeks.
On the evening of May 4th, 1959, as we were settling in for the evening in our hotel room, a very loud siren went off. We had never heard that siren sound before. It wasn’t like a fire alarm or an ambulance siren. Mom had purchased a small radio for me to listen to, where I had discovered a local rock-and-roll station, KPOI (“K-P-O-I, Thirteen Eighty HONO-LU-LU!” as the self-advertising ditty went). We turned on the radio and discovered that we were hearing a tsunami alert. Oahu was going to be hit by a tidal wave. The alarm was a way to warn all the Honolulu citizens to seek higher ground, as far away from the beach, and as high as we could get, in a short amount of time.
We all got dressed hurriedly. Mom had to wake Mark, not yet one-year-old, and dress him and pack a bag of food and water for all of us. With no car, we would put Mark in his stroller and load the back of it with our supplies, and we would then all set off for The Punchbowl, a military cemetery a number of blocks away from us that was the highest point of land in our area.
Just before we left, another siren blared, another sound we hadn’t heard before. The radio announcer told us it was an “All Clear” warning. The anticipated tidal wave wasn’t going to reach us after all. We were safe.
My step-father, Gordy, returned from his latest “30-Days-Out” naval adventure looking for Russians a few days later, and before the fireworks went off between him and my mother, during one of their “All Clear” periods, I remember us all going to visit Waikiki Beach, the nearby beach that could have been inundated by the tidal wave that had threatened us just a few days before.
By the time Gordy took this picture, all of us had been tanned by the Hawaiian sun, and as for me, my feet had been toughened enough from going barefoot as much of the time as I could that I was now going barefoot to school. No more clunky shoes for me.
I was fitting in better with my school friends, and I was now often winning “chasemaster” contests with my fellow classmates, un-soled.
At recess, I had also become accomplished at playing marbles, accumulating my own collection of those special weapons of schoolyard combat purchased with my allowance and finally with my winnings. The games were highly competitive, and we “played for keeps,” so one had to be confident to even enter into those competitions. Meanwhile, my sisters Gema and Paula become jacks’ champions among their cohorts.
In May, our class picture was taken on the same steps where we had flown out of the school and into history in the March “Paradise” magazine picture. You’ll find this haole second row, second from the right. Miss Tom, second row, first on the left, wore a muumuu that day for our class picture, one of the only times I didn’t see her in a dress.
My brother Mark turned one-year-old on May 18th. On May 28th, my birthday, I turned twelve-years-old. Both barefoot boys.
Our school year at Kaahumanu ended one day in June. What day it was, I have no records. Neither do my sisters, and my mother and step-father are no longer with us. At some point in June, after a Quonset hut became available for us to move into, we said our goodbyes to our Napua Hotel neighbors and its employees. Unlike the Count, this wasn’t an escape, but in a way, it felt like one. We had lived in the Napua Hotel for nearly four months, an unusually long stay for any hotel visit.
Looking back, in a strange way, it did feel like the Napua was our “home” when we were there. We celebrated an Easter, Mother’s Day, three family birthdays, and an end to a school year while living there. I lived in the Napua longer than two of my stays in other residences as I grew up, having lived in—as I count them now—17 different “homes” in my first 18 years. In 1965, two years after Gordy left us, I left for college.
My friendship with Charlie Higa was certainly the highlight of my time living at the Napua. Charlie introduced me to new cultures, both mine and his. He shared art and music and storytelling and beauty with me, daily, for a while. Though it was only for a few months, looking back now, it seems even longer and more profound.
Just before we moved out, Charlie asked if I would pose for him in the lobby of the hotel so that he could do a graphite portrait of me on a 14×20 canvas. I wore my ubiquitous striped tee shirt. My hair was close-cropped. I remember that in the sketch, I’m wearing a slight, wry smile, as if I were onto something. Charlie signed the sketch and gave it to me as a gift. I kept that portrait for many years. It went through many moves. Somehow, somewhere, it disappeared. I have no idea of where it ended up. How I wish I still possessed that piece of my history, my shared history with Charlie.
We finally moved into our Quonset hut in June, 1959. And I got a new shirt.
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