I put off writing this for three months because I needed to come to terms with my own memories. It's amazing how things that happened more than 30 years ago could still have a negative effect on me. I've over it now, but putting things into perspective was incredibly hard.

Late in 1973, while my father was working in Hawaii, both he and my mother decided to move the family to the island he was on. In February of 1974, my mother packed up me and my siblings along with a niece and a nephew (both sisters were single mothers, but this isn't their story) and flew us over there. The house wasn't sold — it was put up for rent.

We arrived on Kauai and I started back to school at the tail end of my 8th grade year. The closest town to where we lived was Kapaa, but we lived in a rural area called Kapahi (the house later was tagged with a house number for Kapaa). It was about two miles from the school, which included Kindergarten through the 12th grade. I recently looked for it via Google Earth and it's no longer a school at all — it was probably sold to some land development company — and the school was broken up into parts like other major schools. Obviously, the population grew quite a bit in 30 years.

Within one week, I got into a fight with another teenager in school. I didn't even know he wanted to fight. He said, "You like beef, brah?", and I had no clue what he meant. It was Pigeon English, which was commonly used by people there at the time. I have no idea if that's still the case. Anyway, it turned out that the only reason he wanted to fight me was because I was a "haole". Originally, it meant "stranger or foreigner", but as time progressed it became synonymous with "white person". Although the local people of Portuguese ancestry were as white as we were, they weren't considered haoles.

My family went to different beaches frequently, nearly every weekend. My father liked to go fishing and sometimes some of us would get stuck with him (but on a different day). I knew how to fish, but I found it incredibly boring. I made some friends in the area we lived, but they weren't close friends by any stretch of the imagination. We spent most of our time swapping comics. Comics cost 15, 20 and 25 cents at the time and I usually got four or five every week or so. As I wrote in Comic Book Memories, I became an avid collector.

In the latter half of my 9th grade year, an older girl (I was 14, she was 16) took a liking to me and shortly thereafter I got jumped on the way off the school property by four guys. I saw two of them and not the other two. I got knocked down and kicked all over my body. I have no idea whether the two things were related because the local troublemakers didn't need a reason to beat up a haole. Being a haole was enough for them. When I reached my 10th grade year, I decided I'd had enough of punks and fights and started cutting classes and hanging out with a group of other haoles. Since we weren't allowed to leave school property (closed campus), we had to find unique places to hide from the school officials. That's when I learned to smoke. Not marijuana (although I tried it once) — just cigarettes.

Somewhere along the line, and I don't remember when each happened, but the two sisters with children, two brothers, and another sister headed back to Coolidge, Arizona, to live there again. I don't remember all the reasons, but only the youngest sister was still going to high school — the rest were grown. By the time my mother grew tired of all the bigotry and problems associated with that at the school, there were only my parents, two brothers, one sister, and I living there. We started as 13 people and ended up as six. As I wrote in Live in Hawaii? Nope, Never Again, I would never choose to live in those islands again. If the attitudes and bigotry have changed, which I doubt, it might be different story. One of my readers even accused me of bigotry because I wrote what I wrote. I asked readers, Am I a Bigot?, in response to the accusation and drew many more positive comments than I anticipated.

In November, 1977, everyone except my father packed up and left Hawaii. He still had a job there. He worked in different places in Hawaii for a few more years before moving back in with the family. His job required him to work in places far from home, and no one held it against him.

I could literally write a book about all the events that transpired from February 1974 to November of 1977, but that's not something I'd like to do. It's no wonder that some of the girls in high school were fond of me (and there were many — which probably contributed to me being singled out for fights so much); take a look at my junior and senior yearbook pictures:

I'll pick up the story in a future post. I don't want to ramble on too much at any given time. I only had 10 months remaining before I went on active duty in the military, and that's the beginning of another chapter in my life.