Marian and Willie once helped me win second place in the third-grade Easter egg decoration contest. The night before the contest, I went over to their house, and we all hand-painted eggs. I made a Chinaman with pigtails.

The paint smeared a little, and I think that's what cost me first prize.

Anyway, I was quite proud of it.

But not so proud that I didn't use it in the traditional informal egg-bashing competition during lunch break. You know, that's when you smash the pointed end of your egg into your opponent's. First one to crack loses. I never made it to the finals.

My first-grade teacher, Miss Yanagihara, was a puppeteer. She used hand puppets to entertain us in class, and she often performed at parties.

She was the featured attraction at one of Dad's Lions Club Christmas parties one year. I was a little embarrassed because when the party was over, she came over to say hello to me. I guess all kids are like that. There's always a little discomfort when a teacher singles you out for attention outside the school environment. Fear of the "Teacher's Pet" stigma, perhaps?

I mentioned that our yard had a lot of grass. Well, when we first moved there, the back was nothing but four-foot-tall California grass. Dad hired some older kids from the church Christian fellowship club, and they all came over one weekend to do some clearing.

I knew most of them, as I saw them every Sunday at church. I would guess they were in intermediate or high school, and to me they all looked like adults (remember, I was only in the first grade).

Anyway, I tried not be spoiled and useless, and helped as much as I could, dragging weeds around and working up a few beads of sweat that dotted my mainland-milky white skin.

The kids worked through the day, and by the end of the day, several columns of white and black smoke were rising from our back yard. The massive California grass growth had disappeared, and red dirt was exposed.

I don't know whether Dad bought seed, or cuttings or what, but in a few months, the back yard was covered with grass -- Wailuku grass, we called it. The kind that grows real fast in the rain. And remember, it rained a lot in Hilo.

Mom made special oven-baked barbecue hot dogs for their lunch. Actually, it was the first time I'd ever had that particular dish. Great stuff. The older kids scarfed up the whole shebang in nothing flat.

You see, Mom was a good cook. Years later, when I went to college, I asked her for a bunch of easy recipes. Included among the handwritten index cards was the recipe for the oven-baked barbecue hot dogs. I've embellished the recipe a little over the years, but to this day, it's one of my favorites.

Mom once had a bunch of her recipes published in a story that the Hilo Tribune-Herald wrote about her. We were all real proud, and I know she was, too.

The Mickey Mouse Club. It was the biggest weekly event that we kids looked forward to in Hilo. Of course, when we moved to Ekaha Street in 1950, we didn't have television, so we couldn't participate vicariously in the television Mickey Mouse show.

But we did have our small town version.

Every Saturday morning, hundreds of kids would converge on the Palace Theater, just up Haili Street from the Standard Drug Store. And for just ten cents ("one thin dime, one tenth of a dollar"), we would spend the next three hours in a world of fantasy.

The program would start with contests -- yoyo, singing, dance, riddles -- contests of any and every variety. Next would come the sing-alongs where we'd follow the bouncing ball on the magical screen. By this time, excitement was building to a point where we couldn't wait any more for the cartoons to start.

When the cartoons began, we kids brought the house down with our "Yays" and whistles. Donald Duck's face would fill the screen, heralding a string of three to five Disney cartoons. These were followed by a chapter of Captain Marvel, or Superman, or Cochise, or Flash Gordon. Then, we had a Three Stooges short or two, followed by the feature film -- usually a cowboy movie starring Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or the Three Mesquiteers.

Everything was in black and white (except for the cartoons), and we had no wide screen then. It didn't matter.

It was great. Most of the kids would bring 15 cents, enough for the movie and a small package of crack seed (li hing mui is still my favorite).

Of course, I usually had a quarter, so I could buy a 10-cent bag of popcorn in addition to my crack seed. Interestingly, they didn't let you bring your soda into the theater. You had to drink it outside and throw the cup away before you entered.

Once a year they'd have a big Mickey Mouse birthday party. For the same dime, you'd get (in addition to all the aforementioned contests, sing-alongs, cartoons, serials, comedy shorts, and cowboy feature) a cup of Dairymen's vanilla ice cream, an eight-ounce bottle of Coke, and a comic book. And they still managed to squeeze everything into three hours.

We'd go to these things religiously. Our regular seats were the ones in the back of the front section (I guess it was about the 15th row).

The chairs there weren't the regular fold-up theater seats. They were wicker chairs -- big ones. We'd get there early, claim the chairs, throw popcorn or crack seed seeds on the people in front of us, and generally harass the usherettes.

One of our favorite forms of harassment was to continually ask the usherettes what time it was, and how much longer we had to wait before the movie started. Another was to call her over and tell her we'd dropped something under our seat, and could she please shine her flashlight there so we could see.

I went to the Saturday morning shows all the way through elementary school. We didn't even have to make plans, or have someone to go with. All I had to do was catch the bus or walk to the theater, and guaranteed, there'd be someone there I knew. Of course, when I was a small kid, we used to go in neighborhood bunches.

Then, competition sprang up. The Mamo Theater, which was located on the infamous Mamo Street (home of pool halls and Filipino Cadillacs), started a "Bugs Bunny Club." It was essentially the same thing, except they showed Warner Brothers cartoons, gave us comics every Saturday, and let us take our drinks into the theater.

At first, the Mamo Theater went head-to-head with the Palace. They did fairly well because the concept and program was new, but eventually everybody went back to the Palace. To regain their lost audience, the Mamo moved its kiddie program to the noon hour, then later gave up altogether.

The Mickey Mouse Club programs continued for years, even when I graduated from High School and left for college. But it went downhill with the advent of television. And I guess all the black and white cowboys died off and weren't replaced.

When I was home for Christmas the first year of college, I passed by the Palace Theater and saw the promo billboard on the sidewalk. "Mickey Mouse Club 9:00 A.M. Saturday," it read, "The Sins of Babylon."

The Sins of Babylon?

Let me tell you a little bit about the Ekaha Street chicken yard. I used to spend an appreciable amount of time pressing my face against the chicken wire fence, watching the fowl doings in the chicken yard.

There were regular-sized chickens, bantam chickens, ducks, turkeys, and a lot of wild sparrows that flittered in to steal the chicken feed. The yard was enclosed with chicken wire, and had a long chicken coop in the back. There were a couple of lush guava trees that sort of served as a roof.

All up and down the street, you could hear the ducks quacking, the roosters crowing, the turkeys gobbling, and the chickens clucking.

You could also smell the chicken yard half-way up the street (even to the end, if the wind was blowing in the appropriate direction). Standing just outside the fence, the ripe aroma of rotting guavas, mixed with the various fowl scents could transport me to Bozo's farm (re: my old favorite record album). Even today, the smell of over-ripe guavas bring back the memory of the chicken coop.

We used to see a lot of chicks and often wondered why the population of the yard never grew. Naive, eh? It wasn't until I reached my adolescent years that I finally figured out that the older fowl were being...gulp...eaten.

I once did a gross thing there. I saw this large white egg on the ground. It probably was a turkey or duck egg because a chicken couldn't possibly pass something that big. It sat there, so pure and white. Nothing that nice deserves to sit there undisturbed, I thought, so I picked up a rock.

Yep, I picked up a rock and tossed it over the fence. Right onto the egg. One of the best shots in my life! (Another good shot was the time I threw a rock high into the sky after a fleeing Reggie Martinez and hit him on the right heel.)

The rock went plop, the egg went splat. And every chicken, duck, and turkey in the yard rushed over to slurp up the egg. Gobble, cluck, crow and quack. Zip. No more egg. It was gross. Really gross. Really, really GROSS!

Dayle and I caused a small ruckus one day. Actually, I guess it was my fault. Dayle probably doesn't remember the incident at all. I decided it would be neat if Dayle and I stood at the corner of Ekaha Street and Waianuenue Avenue and scare the drivers that were heading up toward Kaumana.

We watched for cars heading our way, pretended not to notice them, then gave them a "boo," thrusting our arms and bodies out into the street as they got to about 25 feet from us. The horrified expressions on the drivers' faces were funny, so we did it some more.

Remember now, I was about 7 years old, and Dayle was about 3. To the on-coming drivers, it must have looked like we two kids were about to commit suicide by hurling our little bodies in front of their cars.

Like I said, we thought it was good fun. That is, until a cop stopped and made us quit. It seems the drivers had stopped at the Ainako Store and phoned the police. Unfortunately, Dad knew the police real well (many of them were his patients), and I heard all about it again when he made a special trip home from his office. Over the years, Dad made more than one special trip home from the office to speak to me about some mindless thing I had done.

Second grade, Riverside School. Mrs. Nobriega's class. Let's see — what-all exciting happened that year? Well, I got into a schoolbag fight, I got a chain-drive tricycle for Christmas, and I had my tonsils taken out during the summer. Not a very eventful year.

If you remember, I used to have fancy schoolbags. Not the plebeian denim or khaki ones -- oh no, I had the nice ones with lots of special buckles and pockets, and dandy plastic handles. But you know, even though I was different, I always appreciated the fact that those fancy schoolbags were tough.

One day, my classmate Harry "Puna" Chillingworth and I were fooling around, pushing each other all over the lanai in front of Mrs. Nobriega's room. He picked up his khaki schoolbag and started swinging it at me. I picked up my fancy-dancy one and bopped him on the side.

He retreated, still swinging his. I bopped him on the other side. He retreated further, fear in his eyes, still swinging. I was about to bop him on the head when Mrs. Nobriega stepped out of the classroom right between us.

She made us stop. We marched into the classroom and I could hear Puna muttering ahead of me: "No fair, man, that bag is heavy."