Lahaina—Honolulu—Los Angeles—Artesia—1950 to 1952
In the Company of Dead Men, Cops ,and Kings
My sister Jenilee was born on January 17, 1950. All through her pregnancy my mom and dad had called the unborn baby Johnny because Dad had been fervently hoping that it would be a boy this time. If he was disappointed that the baby hadn’t been a boy, he sure wasn’t disappointed for long.
My sisters and I were delighted with the new addition to the family. I was taking my responsibilities as the elder brother very seriously, as were Valerie and Stephanie as older sisters. We all took turns sitting on the chair and holding her. There’s nothing as special as holding a little baby. It’s like holding in your own hands a little miracle that has taken place.
My dad was always busy at either the dispensary-hospital or the many clinics around the island. In the evenings, he frequently had to leave before dinner was finished to go out on a house call, so my sisters and I really treasured any time we got to spend with him. We would see him in the morning at breakfast and then briefly in the evening at dinner before he was called back to the dispensary to set a broken bone or stitch up an injury.
Since my dad was the plantation doctor, he made weekly trips to the small clinic at Honolua Camp, on the pineapple-growing side of the island. Sometimes when he made these trips he would let me ride with him. If he ever saw anyone walking along the road, he would always pick them up and give them a ride.
Mostly, the hitchhikers were old Okinawan women. You could tell by looking at their fingers: Okinawan women were always tattooed in green and blue-green ink up to the knuckles. The older the women were, the more faded the ink on their tattooed fingers would look.
These old women would sit in the car smiling silently and enjoying their ride. Even though my dad would chat with them, they usually only nodded and smiled, perhaps because most of them couldn’t speak very much English if they even spoke English at all. My dad’s attempts at speaking pidgin English were pretty laughable. Sometimes even I had a hard time understanding him when he did this.
Once, when we were almost to Honolua, an old fisherman ran into the middle of the road and flagged down Dad to stop. We got out of the car and followed him down through a dense keawe tree grove toward the ocean.
The fisherman led us to a rocky reef and we walked out to where a middle-aged Filipino man lay dead. The fisherman had seen him floating in the ocean and pulled him out. It was a somewhat shocking sight for a kid my age to witness, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn away.
My dad reached down and turned the corpse’s head and I saw that the eyes were open and looking sightlessly toward the sky. Then with his other hand my dad reached down and gently closed the dead man’s eyes.
I noticed that some white stuff had come out of the dead man’s mouth and had dripped down the side of his face. My dad found a gallon glass sake jug that had apparently been filled with water but was now almost empty.
“This man committed suicide, son,” my father told me.
“How can you tell?” I asked him.
“You see that bottle over there?” he said, pointing out the gallon jug. “He filled it with water and drank almost all of it before he went into the ocean. That way he wouldn’t be able to swallow much seawater and he would drown more quickly.”
I understood what my father meant, or at least I thought I did. After all, I was only seven years old, and this was the first time in my life that I had ever seen a dead body.
It was while I was going to the second grade that the Lahaina drugstore became a daily stop on my way home. I had been introduced to the fascinating world of comic books by my school friends, most of whom avidly collected them. Comic books opened up a whole new world of fantasy and imagination for me, and I quickly became addicted.
Aside from the comic books with cartoon characters like Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Heckle & Jeckle, Little Lulu, and Archie, there were all kinds of other comic books that covered a wide range of subjects—from crime and war to humor and horror, history, superheroes and science fiction, super-thick comic books with stories from the Bible, and even romance comics (which I never bothered to read). It seemed that a whole new world of knowledge and entertainment was opening up to me. Collecting comic books had now been added to my growing list of hobbies.
It was at the Lahaina drugstore that I discovered something wonderful—Classics Illustrated comics, great works of literature presented in an easy-to-read comic book form. It was a monumental discovery for me.
What first drew me to these Classics Illustrated comics was a familiar title that managed to catch my eye: Men of Iron by Howard Pyle. When I saw it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was a comic book version of one of my most prized possessions. And as I read through the comic, I found that now I could finally understand what that thick book that I owned was all about.
Now that literature had been made accessible to me in this digestible form, I became obsessed. I read the classic works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Ouida, Homer, Jules Verne, Nordhoff & Hall, George Eliot, Jack London, and Eugene Sue.
My mother was only too happy to subsidize me with this latest obsession. After I would read the comics we would even discuss the stories because she was already familiar with the books and would tell me even more about the authors and about other books they had written.
I truly believe that this early experience was what sowed the seeds for my lifelong passion for books and literature. Through the Classics Illustrated comic books I became familiar with Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Brontë, H. Rider Haggard, Herman Melville, James Fennimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Wilkie Collins, Dostoyevsky, and many others.
My interest in comic books wasn’t solely confined to the classics. Like most other boys, I liked the Superman and Batman comics, the various war comics and crime-does-not-pay comics, but I especially liked the gory, grisly horror comics put out by Educational Comics (EC). They were full of the wonderfully gruesome illustrations that most of us kids got a vicarious thrill out of seeing.
When my mother took one look at these horror comic books, she said that they were not only disgusting but also far from educational and prohibited me from buying or even reading any more of them. She used the lame excuse that they would probably irretrievably harm my mind.
This was my first taste of censorship, and it didn’t sit too well with me. I didn’t see how a stupid comic book could possibly harm my mind. So her decree didn’t stop me from reading them at the drugstore, and occasionally I sneaked one home to hide in my secret place.
One day my mother returned from a day of shopping in the largest town on the island, which was Wailuku, the county seat, and presented me with a multicolored box decoratively printed with a picture of the earth encircled by ships, planes, and postage stamps. I looked at it curiously and wondered what it was, and when I asked my mother she told me that it was a H. E. Harris worldwide stamp collecting kit and it would open up a whole world of knowledge to me.
It was with great anticipation that I opened the colorful box to find that whole world of knowledge, and found that it contained a profusely illustrated album that would house world-wide stamps from most major stamp issuing countries, a beginner’s packet of world-wide postage stamps, some stamp hinges that were used to mount the stamps in the album, a pair of stamp tongs, a small piece of printed cardboard called a perforation gauge, a watermark detector, and a small pamphlet that said it was a stamp identifier. I was immediately fascinated by all this strange new paraphernalia and I couldn’t remember having been given a more wonderful gift. My mother and I didn’t even realize it at the time but this spur of the moment gift would eventually end up influencing a good part of my young life.
Collecting stamps, my mother told me, would be much more fun than collecting those stinky old milk caps. Stamps were also more educational and beneficial as a hobby. After all, look who collected them, she said as she read off the names of famous stamp collectors from the kit’s booklet: President Franklin Roosevelt, King George V and King George VI, Ayn Rand the writer, Lily Pons the opera singer, King Carol II of Romania, and King Farouk of Egypt.
Truly, I thought, this is indeed the hobby of kings. It was suddenly as if I had become a member of some kind of very exclusive club. Stamp collectors were called philatelists, and, thanks to my mother, I had become one of them. I was now a philatelist, and now that I was a philatelist it might even be said that I shared a hobby that put me in the company of kings. I soon found that these colorful little pieces of paper truly fascinated me.
The old courthouse was a great place to hang out in the summer. It was always nice and cool during a hot summer day. It had the musty old office smell that ancient buildings had—a smell of polished old wood and decaying paper that seemed to emanate from the countless old metal filing cabinets that housed the decades upon decades of documents stored there and forgotten.
It was a great place for me to wait. I would read the numerous wanted posters displayed prominently in the glass wall case beside the counter window while I patiently waited.
Occasionally my waiting bore fruit when I would spot someone who had received an envelope bearing those colorful foreign postage stamps. I would then zero in on them and introduce myself, tell them that I was a philatelist and courteously ask if they would mind giving me the stamps.
In most cases the people I asked didn’t seem to mind my pestering them and gave the stamps to me. Sometimes they simply ignored me. But I especially remember one of the nicer people, a big old kanaka with curly grey hair who always drove up to the post office in this ancient truck of his.
The old kanaka would receive letters from the Gilbert & Ellice Islands, which was, he told me, where he originally came from. The exotic stamps always showed beautiful island scenes and a portrait of the young, handsome King George VI, and when I asked him for the stamps, the kind old man would always laughingly give them to me. I suppose that I really must have really been a pain in the ass to a lot of people back in those days, but these stamps were among this inquisitive child’s most prized possessions.
While the post office occupied the bottom floor of the building, part of the top floor was occupied by the courthouse offices and the Lahaina Police Department.
One day, feeling somewhat bold and adventurous, I walked upstairs. I almost began to have second thoughts when I reached the top and saw a dark hallway that led to a single open door. I was feeling intimidated now, but decided that I wasn’t going to let it show. After all, what could possibly happen to me?
Somewhat hesitantly, I approached the opened door. It led to a large office, brightly lit from the afternoon sunlight streaming in from a big window facing the bay.
Seated behind a large desk, in front of a shiny metal desktop microphone, was a slightly built Japanese-American policeman who introduced himself as Blackie. He had been talking into the microphone to a police car out on patrol, and when he finished he noticed me standing at the door and motioned for me to come on in. He asked me what I wanted and I told him that I wanted to see the police station. He proceeded to show me around.
A small dark hallway near the middle of the room led past a single jail cell in which a large Hawaiian man lay sleeping on a bunk bed. Farther on, there was another large office with a large desk, but no one was in it. Aside from the man in the jail cell, Blackie was the only other adult person in the police station.
When we got back to the front office, I casually asked Blackie if the man in the jail cell was a prisoner. He didn’t look like a prisoner or some kind of dangerous criminal. To me he simply looked like a harmless, lazy old Hawaiian man.
“He’s a prisoner today,” Blackie said, “until someone can come up with the money to pay his fine.”
“Why is he in there, what did he do?” I asked.
“He was caught catching fish with dynamite,” Blackie informed me. “That’s against the law, you know.”
I didn’t know, but now I did, and I resolved that from that day on I would never do it, not that I ever would have in the first place. When I saw that Blackie didn’t really mind, I began to hang around the police station somewhat regularly after school, whenever I wasn’t playing with my friends.
Blackie was a nice guy and he was very tolerant of my childish and almost insatiable curiosity. I had noticed that there were some posters hanging on the wall above his desk that said in big, bold capital letters, “WANTED—BY THE FBI,” similar to the ones hanging in the post office downstairs.
I was intrigued by all these posters that depicted wanted criminals, showing mug shots and fingerprints and detailed descriptions of them and their crimes. They reminded me of the Wanted Posters in the Western movies, but the contemporary criminals depicted on them reminded me of those gritty black-and-white crime movies that I liked so much.
So I asked Blackie if I could have one of them. He found a pile of old ones and gave them to me. I took them home and added them to my other treasures.
Once, when I came up to visit Blackie, he was in the inner office fingerprinting a short, dark-complexioned Japanese man dressed in very dirty clothes. There was another police officer with him. It was unusually crowded in there on that day. Later, after the prisoner had been locked up in the cell and the other policeman left to go out on patrol, I asked Blackie what the prisoner had done.
“The crime he committed,” Blackie informed me, “is that he was catching o’opu [an endangered Hawaiian freshwater fish] with fish bait.”
So much for the dangerous desperadoes in the sleepy town of Lahaina, I thought. The laws of the land can be very strange, but the long arm of the law is ever vigilant and will be there to snare you when you least expect it. I never realized that one could break the law by simply fishing. I wondered if the policeman who had just left was the only other one on the Lahaina police force, because he was the only other one I had ever seen there.
But on that day I had become interested in something totally new and different: fingerprinting. I had already read a little bit about it in the Classics Illustrated comic book of Mark Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson. Puddin’head was the man who first discovered the uniqueness of fingerprints and had adamantly advocated their use as a law enforcement tool.
When I told Blackie about this, I believe that I aroused his interest. I don’t think he had known anything about Puddin’head before. I promised to bring him the comic book so that he could read about him.
After I loaned Blackie my comic book, he fingerprinted me at my request and filled out my information on the fingerprint card with his typewriter. It took a while to convince her but eventually I talked my mother into giving me the money to buy the small portable wooden fingerprint kit that Blackie had showed me in the police equipment catalog. I figured I’d need it for when I eventually became a policeman or FBI agent, because from that point on I had decided that when I grew up I was going to become one or the other.
On the bottom of all of those Wanted posters, there was always a signature beneath which read, “J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” One day I got out pen and paper and wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, DC to notify him of my intentions. I also enclosed the fingerprint card that Blackie had made for me with my fingerprints and personal information on it to show that I was dead serious.
About three months later, long after I had forgotten about even writing that letter, a large, bulging manila envelope arrived for me. When I saw the return address, a thrill ran through my body and with trembling hands I anxiously began to open it. Had my dream been fulfilled and my application to be an FBI agent actually been accepted? No, that was impossible. I was still just a kid.
The large manila envelope contained a letter from J. Edgar Hoover thanking me for my interest in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and informing me that he had enclosed a booklet with information about the FBI, which he hoped I would find informative and useful.
The letter was signed by J. Edgar Hoover himself, a real pen and ink signature, not a fake printed one. And my mother said that he probably typed the letter himself too, as she pointed out a couple of grammatical errors.
Both my mother and father were duly impressed and no longer kidded me about buying the little wooden fingerprinting kit. They could see now that I was a boy with a mission. But it was a different time, one in which I was totally enthralled. Only later in life would I learn what a true asshole Hoover really was.
Of course I never became either a policeman or an FBI agent. In fact, if J. Edgar had gone through the files about known or suspected pornographers before he died in 1972, he might have been surprised about the path in life that the little second-grader eager to be an FBI agent had finally decided to take.
At this point I feel obligated to confess that I wasn’t all that much of the law-abiding Goody Two-shoes that my parents might have expected. Like any other young kid of my age, I tried to get away with whatever I could whenever I could.
I believe that I was in the third grade when I decided to smoke my first cigarette. The idea occurred to me so impulsively that I simply acted on it without thought to the consequences. With all the confidence in the world, I walked into Mrs. Wong’s sweets store, plopped my money on the counter, and asked for a pack of Pall Malls. In an attempt to legitimize my request, I said that they were for my father.
She scrutinized me carefully and said she didn’t know that my father smoked, and of course he didn’t, but I didn’t have to compound my lie because she sold me the cigarettes anyway. For some reason, it goes against the grain of a Chinese merchant to refuse to make a sale.
So with my illegitimately purchased pack of cigarettes I quickly headed to the nearest alley next to Mrs. Wong’s shop and lit one up. Drawing in a good lungful of smoke, I suddenly felt my eyes opening wide and I began choking and coughing. In fact, I never coughed so hard and long in my entire life as I did when I took that first puff of cigarette smoke. I actually thought I was really going to die.
When I finally managed to recover, I thought that I would give it another try. They made it look so nice and easy in the movies. This time I only ended up coughing even harder.
I now had a sore throat to accompany what amounted to a queasy feeling of dizziness. I was dismayed to discover that smoking sure wasn’t as easy as it had appeared to be. Then I remembered how hard my mother had coughed when she had tried to smoke that cigarette back when we were living in Hanalei. At the time, I suppose, she thought that it might make her appear worldlier and sophisticated, but she had wisely given up after that initial failed attempt, and since my throat and lungs ached and my eyes were filled with tears, I decided that I would give up too.
Maybe some people were just not meant to appear sophisticated, I thought as I tossed the remainder of the pack in the nearby trashcan. As I walked out of the alley and down the street, I could swear that I heard Mrs. Wong’s loud laughter coming out from her shop. I felt my face reddening in shame and embarrassment.
My second attempt at smoking came after I pilfered a couple of Havana cigars from one of the boxes my dad kept stored in the dining room closet for guests. My friend Wayne Wong—who was Mrs. Wong’s nephew—went with me deep into the jungle behind my house and we proceeded to smoke them.
Wayne was a full year older than me and far more experienced at smoking. He told me that I had sucked too hard on the cigarette the first time I had tried it which had caused me to cough like that. He taught me to suck more slowly and carefully on the cigar and not swallow the smoke but blow it out.
Before long I was puffing on that cigar like a pro. It made me feel like I was a grown-up, but I didn’t really enjoy smoking all that much back then, and it was not something that I cared to do on a regular basis.
When I told Wayne about the cases of whiskey that my dad kept in the same closet where he kept the cigars, his eyes immediately lit up and he said, “Go bring one bottle so we can try.” I rushed back to the house, snuck past Sakae in the kitchen, and cautiously and silently made my way into the storage closet.
The bottles that had already been opened were on the shelf. I sampled a bottle of the green-stamped bonded bourbon and found it to be much too strong. It burned fiercely going down, literally taking my breath away, and made my head throb and had a heavy and unpleasant taste that realize now I was far too young at the time to appreciate.
Then I tried a sip from the bottle of Early Times and found that it warmed my stomach and was not quite as strong, although it still burned my throat a little as it went down. To me it seemed to be much smoother and far easier to drink than the first, but the taste would take some getting used to.
The bottle was only a quarter full, so I figured my dad probably wouldn’t miss it. He was not a regular drinker, and he had a whole case of the stuff anyway.
So I snuck that bottle out of the house and rushed back to Wayne. While smoking the rest of our cigars, we polished off the bottle of whiskey like true connoisseurs. Fortunately, no one saw us staggering around the sugarcane field like a couple of drunks.
You might think that I would be thoroughly ill after that escapade. By all rights I probably should have been. Unfortunately I wasn’t. Instead I was totally buzzed by the pleasurable and somewhat numbing effects of the alcohol, and I even enjoyed the strong tobacco taste of the Havana cigar.
To this day that adventure still remains etched in my mind as one of my fond memories. That day was the first time that I both drank whiskey and successfully managed to smoke, and I would develop a taste for doing both which would, for better or worse, last throughout my life.
My uncle Wilfred was a police lieutenant, and he was in charge of the radio department for the Honolulu Police Department. He would frequently take me with him on the half hour or so drive from his home in Kahalu’u to the old Bethel Street police station in downtown Honolulu where he.
What I enjoyed most was when I would get to hang around downtown Honolulu all day and wander all by myself. In those days, I suppose it was much safer for a young kid to be out and about unsupervised.
I would casually explore the numerous interesting shops around the downtown area and King Street, sometimes even wandering so far as the glittery red-light area of Hotel Street and the part of the city known as Chinatown, or Hell’s Half Acre around Maunakea Street.
Downtown Honolulu was an exciting place compared to the quiet, sleepy Lahaina town. The numerous stores were filled with all kinds of things that were unavailable back home. At Woolworth’s I could buy packets of postage stamps to add to my ever-growing collection. It was there that I found some unusual large rectangular, triangular, and diamond-shaped stamps from a country I had never heard of before called Tannu Tuva. These stamps, which showed colorful scenes of nomadic Mongol life in that exotic and faraway place, were extremely fascinating to me and I never tired of looking at them and imagining how the natives that they depicted lived.
In my solitary wanderings, I also discovered a stamp dealer named Mr. Bauer who had a little stall in the back of one of the stores on King Street. He was a nice old man who seemed delighted by my youthful interest in stamps. He persuaded me to invest in some old Hawaiian stamps which he assured me would increase in value as the years passed. Whenever I was in Honolulu, I would go to see him and buy more Hawaiian stamps, eventually completing my collection of them with all but the prohibitively expensive early so-called “Missionary” issues.
The “Missionary” issues were the first stamps issued by the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1851, and so few of those stamps have survived that they have always been considered among the rarest of all philatelic items. In any case, Mr. Bauer proved to be right. The Hawaiian stamps did increase in value with the passing years and when I eventually sold them many years later they brought me many times my initial investment.
Some of my parents’ old friends from Kauai would occasionally show up whenever they happened to be in town. One of these friends was a middle-aged Chinese man who had recently appeared as a shopkeeper in the movie called Miss Sadie Thompson that had just been filmed in Hawaii.
At that time it was a big thing for Hollywood to come to Hawaii to make a film, and it was especially exciting for us because they had filmed in our old home village of Hanalei as well as on the beautiful garden island of Kauai.
We were all extremely impressed and listened with rapt attention as he described his experiences working as an extra with these moviemakers. He vividly described meeting famous movie stars like Rita Hayworth, Aldo Ray, and Jose Ferrer, people who I had seen in their much larger-than-life versions as they had appeared on the screen at the Pioneer Theatre.
I went to sleep that night and imagined being on an actual movie set alongside these glamorous movie stars, watching fascinated as they made the movie. Little did I know that one day in the far future I would come to direct a contemporary and much more erotic film adaptation of that very same story.
There is an old saying that says the third time is the charm, but for my dad it was the fourth time. In October 1951, my brother Bryan William Toney was born, and my step-father finally had his own son. A son of his own blood, that is, because, as he was always very careful to remind me, I was also his son.
I’d like to make it clear that whenever I write the word step-father I only do it as a matter of clarification. I’ve always considered Dr. Toney to be my father, and I’ve always loved him like a father, as he was the only father that I ever actually knew. I called him “Dad” and he called me “son,” and he always treated me as if I were his very own. One thing my mother instilled in us kids was the importance of family. I have never considered my half-sisters and half-brother anything other than my sisters and brother. We have always been close, and we have always looked out for each other.
My father’s boss in Lahaina was a distinguished old Scotsman named John T. Moir Jr. They were good friends. Mr. Moir had been the manager of the Pioneer Mill Sugar Plantation since 1933. In 1952, Mr. Moir decided to retire and move away from Lahaina. Before he left, he invited my dad and I over to his house and gave us some of his possessions. One thing he gave us was a beautiful Remington .22 caliber rifle with a highly polished dark hardwood stock. This rifle would eventually end up being one of my most prized possessions.
By July of 1952, the Pioneer Mill Company was deeply in debt, and there was a very real possibility that the hospital might close. Now that there were five children in the family to support, this, quite naturally, caused them a great deal of concern. My dad began searching out jobs on the mainland. Later that month, he flew over there to investigate several of the job offers that he had received from Arizona and New Mexico.
When he returned to Lahaina he had made a decision: we would move to the mainland. So, at the age of nine, I learned that our family was embarking on a great new adventure to a town called Artesia in the state of New Mexico.
The very thought of New Mexico conjured up the images of cowboys and Indians and the Wild West depicted in the numerous Western movies that I had seen.
Like any child, I was eagerly looking forward to an exciting and novel experience, but I was also somewhat reluctant about leaving all of the friends I had made in Lahaina and the now-familiar place where I had spent so many of my childhood years.
Before we left Lahaina, there was a big going away luau feast in our backyard attended by nearly all of the hospital employees and many of my parents’ numerous friends, acquaintances, and patients from all over the island.
My father had been a very popular doctor in that community, and there were many people who were sad that he was going to leave. It was indeed a festive occasion, but it was also a somewhat sad one. Even us kids could feel it. Perhaps I would never see most of the friends and acquaintances of my Lahaina childhood ever again. I remember this was a very disturbing thought at the time. In my later life, I would discover just how very important my childhood had been for me.
Sometimes, in my later life, when I would encounter the numerous frustrations of adulthood, when my responsibilities seemed to overpower me, and I just felt too worn out or too afraid to go on, I would close my eyes and think back to those carefree days I spent as a child wandering around Lahaina, seeking to discover and experience the world around me.
I would remember the times when, walking alone on the beach in the early morning, one could smell the fresh purity of the sea and the eternal symphony of the waves breaking and crashing up onto the shore, bringing with them the seashells, driftwood, and treasures carelessly discarded by either nature or man.
In later years, these fondly remembered images would comfort me and remind me that life could be so beautiful and so simple. This has always allowed me to regain the courage, will, and determination to suck it up and continue on.
We arrived in Los Angeles after a long trans-Pacific flight on Pan American Airlines on Monday, October 3, 1952. We spent a good part of the first week staying at Grandmother Chinn’s house where met with family and friends from her side of the family and from my mother’s side of the family while waiting for our two cars to arrive from Hawaii.
We spent the rest of the month and part of the next sightseeing in Los Angeles and the other parts of Southern California. The Los Angeles area is a huge place and there was an awful lot to see.
We went to Hollywood where we stayed at a small old motel with a charming little courtyard for a couple of days. It was the first time in my life that I had ever stayed in a motel. Like all of the other tourists, we walked around exploring the streets and shops of Hollywood.
One shop, a place called Larry Edmund’s Book Shop, particularly fascinated me. I spent as much time as I could in there, looking over the vast stock of books on film they had to offer. I had never even conceived that there could be so many books on the subject.
We drove around, gawking at the large houses and mansions in the surrounding area, which included Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills, eagerly looking for but not seeing any movie stars.
Later we drove to downtown Los Angeles to take in the bustling metropolitan area. We went to see the myriad exotic touristy shops and the wishing well at New Chinatown before finally ending up at the Grand Central Public Market where both of my uncles, Jimmy Chung and Art Sue, loaded us down with fresh fruit from their produce stalls.
My dad was like a kid in a candy store there as he shopped around for the various delicacies that had been unavailable in Lahaina. He bought several kinds of cheese—mostly of the smelly variety—some cured olives, freshly sliced garlicky hard salami, and a freshly baked loaf of French bread from the Italian deli stall to take back with us to the motel and snack on later.
The trip to downtown Los Angeles and the crowded confusion of the big public marketplace definitely left their mark on me. I wasn’t used to the hustle and bustle of a huge metropolis like Los Angeles. I don’t think any of us really were. It was a little scary for us kids; we were afraid that if we ever got lost we would never be found. After a few days in a totally different world, we were all more than ready for a change of pace.
For the rest of the week we stayed at a little motel in Anaheim where we could look out of the back window and see rows and rows of orange trees. I remember the freshness of the citrusy smell that filled the air and the comforting heat of the California sun.
We went to a famous tourist attraction nearby called Knott’s Berry Farm where we feasted on Mrs. Knott’s famous fried chicken in the farmhouse-type restaurant before we walked through the authentically recreated old Western town.
We didn’t see any berries growing there, and the place didn’t look at all like a farm, but there were a lot of fun rides to go on as well as other attractions. Altogether it was a totally new experience for all of us, especially us kids, so we all ended up having a lot of fun.
The day arrived when it was finally time to make the journey to our new home in the small southwestern town of Artesia, New Mexico.
Before we left, we all went to a large department store in downtown Los Angeles where we shopped for some warmer clothes. We had come from Hawaii with only tropical attire, which would be fine for the summers in our new home, but as it was we were totally unprepared for the approaching winter. The shorts and short-sleeve shirts I was accustomed to wearing just wouldn’t cut it.
All of our stuff had arrived in Los Angeles on a ship from Hawaii. My parents had made arrangements for it to be transported to our new home by a Mayflower moving van while we set out simultaneously in both of our cars, Dad leading in one car while the second was piloted by Mom. It seemed to take forever just to get out of Los Angeles because it was such a huge city, but once we did, we were finally on the open road. A new adventure was just beginning.
Although from time to time I could see hints of beautiful panoramic vistas, the long stretches of flat and uninteresting desert turned out to be tedious and boring. The trip was especially wearing on my sisters and little brother who became cranky and irritable. After a while, even reading the garishly illustrated advertising billboards along the highway became more than monotonous. I was somewhat underwhelmed.
We crossed the Continental Divide and there were still no signs of cowboys and Indians, but the ever-present array of big billboards purporting to sell all kinds of Indian souvenirs became a little more interesting. When we got out of the car and checked them out, however, these places were pretty disappointing. It was very windy, dusty, and almost unbearably hot in the Arizona desert. This was certainly not the Wild and Wooly West that I had so eagerly anticipated.
It was around the middle of November when we finally arrived in Artesia, New Mexico, and I was soon to get my first taste of really cold winter weather.