This year we are talking mostly about things that happened in 1913. The world was at peace, just like now. Edward, Prince of Wales, went to Berlin and visited his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, and wrote about the trip in a national magazine letter.
That same year, my future stepmother, Clarissa Eby, also went to Berlin, knowing little about the language or customes, but soon learned that many things were "verboten". When it came to public transportation one of the things that was verboten was Damen mit unverdeckten Hutnadelspitzen. Violaters would be ausgeschlossen. One didnot dare to sit on a lady's hat for fear of suffering from apinintheseatus.
From Berlin she went to Holland, arriving late at night in an unfamilier country with unfamilier currency. She hired a cab to take her to her hotel, and after a long journey held out a fistful of money and told the driver to take what he needed for the fare. But when she looked out the window of her room the next morning she found that the hotel was across the street from the train station where she had just arrived.
In 1913 the Panama Canal had been under construction since 1904, and would not be opened until the following August, an important event sidestepped to the bacl pages of newspapers by news of war in Europe. San Francisco made up for the lack of publicity by having the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915 and 1916, celebrating both the opening of the canal and the rising of the city from the ashes of the fire and earthquake of 1906.
My parents did the daring thing of taking a ride over the city in an open cockpit "aeroplane" and had their pictures taken, goggles and all, to show the folks back home.
In 1913 Honolulu was celebrating its third year with dial telephone service in recognition of the many languages spoken by the polygot population. Elsewhere there were only hand-crank telephones if any, and there was no inter-island telephone service. Fast communication was by wireless telegraph at 15c per word including each word in the address. This resulted in patrons taking shortcuts, and clerks were supposed to know where to deliver messages addressed to names like "Edna B", "Kit Carson" and the like, minus street address. Internationally there was a submarine telegraph cable, said to cost $1 a word, and a new competitive and cheaper wireless telegraph system.
With wages low, who could afford these luxuries? Mostly the newly wed and the nearly dead.
In 1913 my parents were celebrating the freedom of knowing that the last of their four children, namely, yours truly, had been born in December the previous year. There would be no more. They threw away the mold.
They were married in Honolulu in 1903 at the home of the Lewers family on premises now occupied by the Halekulani Hotel. The wedding book contains signatures of members of the Lewers family and the scrawled "X" of a new baby, Catherine Lewers Wall.
On March 4, 1913 Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as President of the United States, the first person who was a member of the Democratic party to be elected president this century, following Republicans William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. What better than to send a delegation to Hawaii to see how things are going after Hawaii had been an Organized Territory of the United States since 1900.
Getting to Hawaii was no mean undertaking. From Washington it meant days by train to the West Coast and many more by ship to Honolulu. If to Maui, where we lived, one more day by ship when available, all in the open ocean.
Because of the time problem, tourists were few and far between, and hotels an Maui were scarce if any. For this reason upper management in Honolulu recognized that the managers of sugar and pineapple plantations and ranches outside of Honolulu were expected to provide food and lodging for persons of importance and thus gave the local managers nice homes and servants to maintain them. Each home and environment was a fiefdom unto itself.
My father majored in electrical engineering at Stanford but as a newly married man with children on the way and a preference for the Hawaii climate, he took jobs where they were available and accepted employment at Wailuku Sugar Company on Maui as a bookkeeper, ending up in 1908 as manager. We had a newly constructed multi-bedroom residence with a nearby guest cottage and neatly manicured grounds; a cook, a woman to do housework and wait on table, another to do laundry, a man to take care of the chickens and pick up the eggs, then milk the two cows and be available as chauffeur of the 1912 model family Cadillac.
The company provided an E.M.F. for business use. It had a defective differential, and sometimes stalled on curves and earned the nickname "Every Morning Fix It". But that's all right, Papa was the boss and could summon a horse and worker out of a cane field to pull him and car of the curve and get him going again.
In the business climate of 1913 we thus found ourselves playing host to authors, the governor of Hawaii, museum curators, artists, explorers, and, last but not least, the politically important Democrats from Washington who had come to see for themselves how things were doing. Anong these was Carter Glass, Secretary of the Treasury, who took a shine to brother Chadsey, then three years old. On returning to Washington Carter Glass sent him a gold watch along with a certificate saying that the watch had indeed been given to him by the Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1944, a war year, Chadsey was in Washington as an officer in the U.S.Army and showed Mr.Glass the watch. The former Secretary, now a senator in Virginia, remembered the Maui visit and recalled several incidents that took place at the time. Unfortunately, in this day of high price of gold, someone later stole the watch, and it is gone forever, perhaps melted down for the gold.
So what have I been doing in Hawaii in 1999? In January I spent one night at a bed-and-breakfast inn located in a part of Hilo called Reed's Island, a beautiful tropical wilderness that would be hard to match. It is in a former residence of the Shipman family and is operated by one of the descendants. Their pride and joy is to note that in days gone by Queen Liliuokalani was a guest of the Shipmans and played their piano while smoking a cigar.
In May, Tom and Lian McSpadden came in from Texas and wanted to tour Maui, where Tom and I had visited 41 years ago. Now Tom has gone from a rosy-cheeked youth, age 22, fresh out of the Marines, starting as a teller in a branch bank in Waikiki, to executive vice president of a bank near the Mexican border, taking advantage of his knowledge of Spanish and other languages, thanks to his sharp mentality. It was a pleasure to see them.
In July it was back to Maui again, this time with a cousin (actually a second cousin-once-removed - his grandfather was my mother's first cousin) Craig Everett, who is a policeman in the California Highway Patrol in San Diego. A great guy and a dandy person to have as a relative.
Come Thanksgiving it was off to Kona for the customary family gathering at the Wakefiled Ranch, 17 persons at the table. Those five days were enough to drive a rent car 544 miles and see old friends like Jerry "Bing Bang" Bockus, Lucky and Hayley Lake, and the who Schuster clan. I gained three pounds.
So saying, I wish a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.
Charles Penhallow
Christmas Letter - 1998
When I wrote a year ago, that Conrad Hansen's 1903 Oldsmobile might show up at the opening of the H-3 "Interstate" freeway early in December I was mistaken. The opening ceromony was invitational; I did not get invited; and there was no parade of old vehicles. But is pays to advertise. My 1997 Christmas letter had been in the mail only a few days when there was a knock at the door and who should show up but Jim Wayman, announcing that the auto had indeed been on display in the Oldsmobile showroom, but was not owned by the agency, and when the agency moved to Pearl Ridge the owner took the auto home and it is now safely stored in a warehouse. End of that story for the time being.
Because the personnel at Pearl Ridge had suggested the car must have been owned by Schuman Carriage Company, that brought to mind my experience with a driver for the Wahiawa Taxi back in 1933, when I went on the telephone company's permanent payroll, after several years of part time work.
In 1933 I was assigned the job of vacation relief wireless telegraph operator, working half the week in Wahiawa at ship-to-shore station KHK and the other half in Honolulu, handling personal telegrams between Honolulu and the neighbor islands. This was "Depression" time, and the New Deal in Washington was encouraging corporations to create employment by spreading work around. Until that time, personnel at the Wahiawa station worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in eight-hour shifts. If someone got sick, the others filled in. A similar situation existed at the Honolulu office.
The company provided free housing in Waihawa, reimbursed me the 50c fare for the 20-mile ride to Honolulu, reimbursed me the $1.50 a night for lodging at the Blaisdell Hotel on Fort Street, and again reimbursed for the "taxi" back to Wahiawa. The drivers were a talkative lot, and one of them told of his first purchase of an automobile back in 1910, purchased from Schuman Carriage in Honolulu. Evidently a mere thing like a drivers license was not required. The salesman showed him how to make the car go, pointed him in the direction of Waihawa, and assured him that by the time he got to Waihawa he would know how to drive.
Today there is the H-2 "Interstate" freeway, but in 1910 and even in 1933 getting to Waihawa was a hazardous undertaking and an experience to be remembered.
Now let's jump to the year 1922. In the summer of 1922 I was not yet ten years old, was getting used to a stepmother, my mother having passed away two years earlier, and was getting ready to enter sixth grade in September. My allowance, to be used as I pleased, was one dollar a month. Out of this money I managed to save three silver (Morgan) dollars which I had hidden under the lining of a bureau drawer. At about this time the Wrigley chewing gum company had come out with a peppermint coated gum, twelve tablets to the package, selling for five cents a package. When I found that a whole carton of 20 could be had for eighty cents I rushed to the drawer, only to find the money was gone.
At dinner that night, Grandmother Penhallow, the perennial guardian of the morals of her grandchildren, declared that there was no theft; she had found the silver dollars, and had put them in the bank, because there was no telling what a child that age would do with all that money lying around. The Salvation Army man had been by the week before, and among other preachments had declaimed against the vulgar practice of gum chewing, and I was not about to reveal what I planned to do with the money. Besides, said the family, the money was still mine; all I had to do was have one of the adults go with me to the bank and get it out, as long as I had a good use for it. No way. I would wait until the next dollar was due and quietly buy the gum.
Grandmother was what one might call a benevolent despot. She took care of me when I was sick, and taught me how to read long before school age. Left a widow in her 63rd year she moved into the household and thereupon appointed herself a committee of one to discipline her two younger grandsons, Chadsey and Charles, a discipline administered by means of a whip, the same whip she used on her dog. This action did not engender terms of endearment. She would go on the rampage if the morning coffee was not to her liking, and the household help could be heard grumbling that "today Baba San huhu". When Baba San was huhu, it was wise to steer clear.
She out-lived her husband, a sea captain, by 26 years, and attributed her long and healthy life to her years spent at sea with Grandfather Penhallow. However, her brothers lived well into their 90's without going to sea. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that her good health was due to the fact that no self-respecting microbe would dare bite her.
Born in Maine in 1851 she had a whale-oil mentality and would go around the house turning off lights to save electricity, telling yours truly to stop studying so late at night, unwilling to accept the assurance that one evening of studying late could be measured at a cost of pennies. Further arguments would result in "Don't contradict your elders."
My other grandmother, my mother's mother, Grandmother Reynolds, lived beyond 100, and outlived her son, who died at age 79. When he stopped going to see her the family decided not to tell her he had died. But she already had her own explaination: The rascal had found himself a new wife and didn't want Mother to know.
That grandmother had failing eyesight and was talked out of continuing to drive her Model T Ford at age 82, by which time she was driving to church by counting the shadows that went by, knowing that they were utility poles, so many shadows before turning left, and so many more before turning again into the church area. God was on her side, and so were her neighbours, who kept out of the way when they saw her coming.
So saying, I confess that I turned 86 on December 9 and got my drivers license renewed for another two years.
I ran out of brothers in February when my brother Richard died at age 92. His ashes have been buried next to those of his wife, Olive, who passed away the day of their 68th anniversary in 1995. He died in Kona; was buried on Kauai.
Last year I wrote that my brother Chadsey died in Arizona in November, just a month short of his 88th birthday. His ashes were brought to Honolulu this July for burial in the family plot in Nuuanu, the summer date selected so that great grandchildren of school age could be present.
In April I went to Arizona to see Chad's widow, Barbara, attended Easter services with her in Sun City West, and in six days, Honolulu to Honolulu, managed to make stops in Long Beach, San Diego, Laguna Beach and of course, Sun City West, all done by car starting from Los Angeles Airport.
After Arizona I joined a couple of vactioning sea captains, Dick Haugh and Jerry Hasselbach, and rented a cottage on a beach in Kapho, a few miles south of Hilo. The so-called beach was lava rocks, no sand, and for swimming we had available a fresh water pool of warm water heated by am old lava flow. the cottage was a mile from the site of the spectacular eruption of January 1960, which I had photographed with my movie camera. In short, we were in an active volcano area. But real estate people are perennial optimists and had at least two other cottages for rent near us, all in a gated area; there would never be another eruption here, in their view. Never mind that there had been one in 1955.
Thanksgiving in Kona closed the year's social activities. CHadsey's great grandchildren have reached the age where they are fun to be with, and we all had a fine time.
Happy holiday season to all!
Much Aloha,
Charles
"CHADSEY"
I assume Peter told you that his full name is Peter Chadsey Penhallow, named for my brother Chadsey, who died three years ago at age 87.
The name Chadsey originated when an aunt of General Greene married a William Chadsey. The general's sister married a Mr.Reynolds, and generations later Frances Loring Chadsey married her distant counsin Sheffield Reynolds and they became our grandparents.
Accoriding to family love, when my mother was pregnant with Chadsey in 1909 a family friend, Mrs.Kate Wells, happened to be looking through our family album and came across a photo of Frances Chadsey Reynolds, and asked "Who is this ugly looking person?" When told, she said "Then the baby should be named Chadsey". I wasn't there, so don't ask me for confirmation, but Chadsey he was, and remained all his life despite the fact that he tried to have his name changed to Henry after our father, Henry Balch Penhallow, but had to settle for Henry Chadsey Penhallow at age 14. It was too late to become Henry, and thus he was H.Chadsey Penhallow, or just plain "Chad", for the rest of his life.
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