(The Brand New Ilikai Hotel, Waikiki, 1965)
 
The crunch of the snowplow outside- a few cursory passes by a man in a dirty white pick-up truck- signals the call to the breakfast table and the start of a new day with the folks. I am not far on Mom’s List, which includes printers and cars and things of that ilk.
 
Most of my efforts here are failures, but one tends to concentrate on those things that have a modest hope of successful resolution, as opposed to those that are inevitable.
 
I can and will drive them around today, perhaps as far as Charlevoix. I will start to look at the weather to see what the fronts will offer in terms of clear roads back south, and the insulation of the miles from the anguish of watching the folks cope with the deep and profound implications of the next hundred days of Michigan winter.
 
My sons- at least one of them- have arrived in Hawaii for a week’s respite from the winter chill. Since there has been no word of another mischance in the air, I have to assume that they are both on the ground where the gentle breeze is rich with the smell of earth and flowers and the whiff of decay.
 
They are staying at the residence of a Lieutenant of the Cruiser Navy, and that is where my memories join theirs. They were just little guys when they lived in the Friendly Isles, and I was younger and color in my hair and the crooked grin of irrational hope.
 
The boys are Kama’ainas- “children of the land,” in hawaiian, just like the President. That is a title that only those who are actually born in the islands can claim, and it has both everything and nothing to do with race and culture. Part of that culture is The Navy, of all things, since we are only among the latest of the navigators to arrive at this crossroads of the mid-Pacific. It is part of all our lives, those of a certain generation, anyway. That includes Rex and Jack Graf and hundreds of thousands more to one degree or another.

Even me and the Ex and the Boys.

While they are on O’ahu, the boys say they will try to get to the old Navy housing area where we lived on Pearl Harbor, a million-dollar view from a moth-eaten little house that perched on the mound of reclaimed soil that made navigation around Ford Island possible.
 
That was the first part of the 1980s, the decade of greed back on the Mainland, and the continuation of the wild real estate speculation that threw towers into the sky in Waikiki.
 
The new Japanese-fired exuberance was poured in concrete over an older Hawaii, the Territorial period in which the Haoles ruled the roost and a wild polyglot community surrounded the omnipresent military presence around the harbor and at Barber’s Point to the west, and K-Bay across the Pali.
 
The memories of wet lunches in the civilian side are faded now, tied into favorite haunts of open-neck short sleeves shirts and three-martini lunch. In Waikiki, the places to go for the discriminating sailor would have included the Red Vest and Tony and Peaches Guerrero’s Tropics.
 
Once, the district around Hotel Street and the Aloha Tower where the cruise ships docked would have been the place to go. So much had changed since the War. Ala Moana Park and the sprawling Ala Moana Shopping Center had been created from a three-foot deep swamp. The ewa end (east, to you guys) was not sealed off until 1955, and the Ala Wai Basin was not a concrete creation until just a few years before the new War in Asia had begun.
 
The Ilikai Hotel- the one that features in the introductory scene to Jack Lord’s Hawaii 5-0- was still new, and people were just getting used to the idea that you could not see Diamond Head from the Waikiki Yacht Club.
 
The vibrant business and sporting community had needs for entertainment. The yacht club had been formed almost as soon as Navy control of all coastal waters was relaxed.
 
Charlie Brown, who ran the Red Vest (sometimes referred to as the Yacht Club East), insisted that if you poured a strong drink and kept the bartenders behind the rail, you would have a successful place, and that is one of the reasons that Jack Graf and his comrades from FICPAC liked the Red Vest as an escape from the war.
 
The Red Vest was gone by the time I got to the gentle islands, but it was the place to be if you were hip and mature enough to like progressive music and a really strong mai tai.
 
That is where we are going tomorrow.
 
Aloha.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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