TALKING HAWAI`I’S STORY: ORAL HISTORIES OF AN ISLAND PEOPLE is a must read book for its wealth of talk-story reminisces by local folks. Great as a Xmas gift.

It’s a given that Queen Lili`uokalani looms large in Hawaii’s history. But in The Rascal of Waikiki by Lemon “Rusty” Holt we learn of her down-to-island style when she visited Rusty’s mom in Waikiki, early 1900s. How she loved to eat coconut meat, soft enough to spoon out – from trees on Rusty’s family place…trees he climbed to fetch the nut then husk for her. Or the manini fish, caught by Rusty, with his shorts as the trap, off Waikiki beach, for the deposed queen to eat raw; as well lipoa seaweed.

Rusty also tells how he alone, of all the jealous neighborhood kids, regularly surfed tandem with powerfully built Prince Kuhio. On that ali`i’s long and heavy red-wood board which was tied under the pier when not in use – and nobody touched it. A telling that makes Kuhio just a common neighbor. This same Prince Cupid, whose great-grandfather was Kaumuali’i, the king of Kaua’i during the Kamehameha the Great era. Kuhio, the Territory of Hawai’i rep in Congress in the 1920s; who, when a young man, was jailed as the Royalist leader of the attempted armed take-back of the Hawaiian Kingdom, illegally wrested from his aunt, Lili`uokalani.

(Rusty included the “Stonewall Gang” photo of 37 bare-chested men, in trousers, standing on Waikiki beach. In front of them are six boys kneeling – one of them my father. Whew, chicken-skin)

And that’s just one article. There’s more – a chop-suey mix of twenty-nine topics about rascals, and heroes, and those in-between. Tellings of routine life, “back then”: at work, at home, at play, in school and church, with friends and family. In the voices of Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese, Korean and others. Surely, there are good-fun stories in the book that’ll connect to you personally. Where you can add your own remembrances as I’ve done.

Tags: Hawaiian Stories

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Biography, Hawaii biography and memoir, Hawaii history, Hawaii non-fiction, Hawaii short story collection, Romance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.