Hawaii Preparatory School was actually a very fine school. It was rigorous (we went to classes six days a week), strict (anyone caught smoking or drinking, even off campus, was automatically expelled with no chance of reinstatement) and intimate (forty two kids in my graduating class; four of us in second year Greek...). It was also very cold. You're, no doubt, thinking "Come on, you're in Hawaii, for Christ's sake... How cold could it be?" Well... I'll tell you. We were about four thousand feet above sea level in the middle of a cow pasture on a bluff overlooking the Hamakua coast, a place that caught the brunt of the tradewinds that came roaring in from the Pacific. In the Winter, from our dorm rooms we could look up and see Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa with their lofty peaks girdled in snow. During those winter months it got pretty cold. There was no heat in the dorm rooms, in the common rooms, the dining room, the class rooms, or the church (which we had to attend twice a week and especially on Sundays, in our coats and ties). That left only two ways to get warm; get into bed or get into the showers. Since the showers provided instant heat, that was the preferred method of defrosting our tender little bodies. The shower room for each dorm consisted of a tiled room open in front with two steel posts with shower heads sticking out in a radial pattern. Imagine this scene: Five or six naked bodies huddled in a circle around the shower post getting blasted by the hottest water they can stand. The redness of the skin reflected the amount of time in the shower.
Unburdened by girls, and with our surfboards safely stashed back home, my brother and I managed to right the listing academic ship and do fairly well in school. The school wasn't finished yet and we had to be bussed everyday to the classrooms in town. The classrooms were a former Marine barracks left over from WWII. The walls were canex (pressed fiber board made from sugar cane stocks) and the floors were rough planking with lots of knot holes that allowed us to observe the goings ons on the ground under foot; mostly sugar cane rats scuttling about. On the cold winter mornings we would sit there shivering with our hands under our butts while the teachers droned on about how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and how the Monroe doctrine was the keystone in America's manifest destiny etc. etc. Because of the modest size of the school's enrollment, if you were of goodly stature and fairly well coordinated, you could count on being on the varsity teams of your choice. I saw my fellow classmates moaning and groaning about having to endure another grueling football practice in the cold unrelenting wind, so I opted for volleyball in the fall. Basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring. Volleyball and basketball took place in the dark and rickety wooden gym in downtown Waimea, the little cow town that was the seat of Parker ranch, the second largest privately owned cattle ranch in the U.S. A large part of the island of Hawaii, the largest in the Hawaiian chain consisted of cow pastures. The rest, it seemed, was sugar cane. The town's gym was no great shakes but at least we were out of the elements. Our school was situated on ten very exposed acres smack dab in the middle of a cow pasture. And yes...cow tipping was a favorite prank amongst the student body. Our school emblem was a tree blowing in the wind and our team name was the Kamakanis (the Hawaiian word for wind...).
High School Graduation, before the leis were piled on.
Our guidance counselor encouraged me to apply to Stanford and Pomona with Washington U. and Oregon U. as backstops. I sent in my applications and waited for a reply. Several weeks later (I remember that I was reading Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" at the time) a packet came for me in the mail. "Congratulations!" the letter read. "You have been admitted to Leland Stanford Junior University!" "Oh no!" I thought to myself. "I've only been admitted to the Junior university!" I was beside myself with grief until the guidance counselor gently explained that that was the full name of Stanford University.
I was so happy to get on that plane to San Francisco and say goodbye (and good riddance) to my stepmother, whom we had taken to calling the wicked witch of the west... When I got to SF I was herded into a van and driven down highway 101 to the Stanford campus. The ride took about forty-five minutes, as I remember. Where I had just come from, if you drove anywhere in a straight line for forty-five minutes, you would end up in the ocean. The van ride took so long, I thought we were halfway to Los Angeles. I had heard about LA with its evil smog, choking out the daylight and shortening the lives of its poor inhabitants. I was sure the haze I saw, when I looked south towards San Jose and the Santa Clara valley, was LA's smog creeping toward us. (My sense of 'mainland' geography was not very well developed yet)
My freshmen roommate was a big jolly fellow from somewhere called Whittier in southern California. Seeing my aloha shirt and the many garlands of flowers around my neck he immediately surmised where I came from. "Hey!...you're a Haole from Hawaii!" he exclaimed; "I dig your bitchin' aloha shirt!" I was "Haole" from then on. I gave him one of my aloha shirts to wear and several of my flower leis. "Let's wander around and check out the campus." As we approached the student commons, (Tresidder Union, I believe...) I noticed movement in the trees above us. "Hey, Wayne, look up in that tree! There's a bunch of mongeese running around! I've never seen a mongoose climb a tree before." "No Haole, those are squirrels".
At some point we got separated and I got totally lost in my attempts to navigate my way back to the freshmen dorm. Instead I ended up on fraternity row and it took a kindly upper classman to point me in the right direction. After my humble little boarding school, Stanford seemed like a veritable metropolis. The students were also a bit overwhelming. I, having taken typing in summer school some years before, was a very competent typist and I came up with the idea of offering my typing services to comely freshman coeds in exchange for them doing my laundry. I figured it was as good a way as any to meet girls. Having spent five years at an all boys' school I hadn't had much experience with the opposite sex and, indeed, I was still a virgin.
I had two main goals at Stanford. Lose my virginity and play volleyball. Luckily, my typing offer scared up a few customers that also became dates. The first gal I typed for and dated was named Diane. She hailed from some little burg in the greater Los Angeles area. She carried a 4.0 GPA all through high school and was elected the first female student body president in the school's history, and I believe she was also the valedictorian. The second gal I dated was a big strapping blond named Sharon. Sharon was from Glendale, I believe, (none of these So. Cal. towns were even remotely familiar to this naive young island boy in his aloha shirt and flower leis.) She only pulled a 3.9 GPA, however she had won three gold medals and a silver as a swimmer in the '64 Olympic games. The town of Glendale had a Sharon Stouder day and she was paraded through town like a Rose Bowl queen; perched on top of the back seat of a Cadillac convertible waving to the adoring throngs with the mayor sitting next to her.
I, on the other hand, had no such accomplishments under my belt. I began to realize what a small frog I was in this big pond. That sentiment was driven home on big game week that freshman year. I had been quite the thespian in high school with singing leads in a couple of Gilbert and Sullivan plays. And I won our school's version of the Oscars. I also sang and played guitar in our school's folksinging trio. I felt pretty confident when I went for a tryout for that year's Gayeties. I walked into a small music studio with a piano accompanist and the play's director. "Pick some sheet music from the pile on the piano and give us your best shot". I quavered my way through a rather tepid rendition of "Try to Remember" from "The Fantastics". "Thank you Mr... ahh...Mr. Stevens! We'll call you if you make the cut". A few days went by and nothing. "Maybe the director lost the phone number for Wilbur Hall", I thought naively to myself. Later I realized I should have done "Seventy-Six Trombones" so I could really belt it out and show the director that I could 'play to the back row'... So the thespian thing was out but I did get to play a lot of volleyball and even, eventually, managed to get rid of that pesky virginity thing.
Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres
Senior Year, Stanford U. 1970
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