At least once a year, the E.K. Fernandez Carnival would come to town for a couple of weeks. It situated all over the place, but generally near the present Hilo Civic Audutorium, or at St. Joseph's School, about a half-mile away from Obachan's house.

Invariably, it rained. One of Dad's favorite saying was that whenever E.K. Fernandez comes to town, it was going to rain. Come to think of it, I heard that a lot in those days. I believed it too, until I realized that no matter who came to town, it was going to rain. Hilo simply was the rain capital of the world.

One year, Obachan told me that Al Capone's (she pronounced it "Capo-nay's") gangster car was going to be displayed at the carnival. I think it was Walter Janado and I who walked to St. Joseph's, and paid our dime to see the historic car.

It was an old '30s sedan, with bullet-proof windows. The man showed us where the bullets had bounced off the windows, leaving little marks. We gasped at the bullet holes in the fenders. We gasped at the little holes where Al Capone's tommy guns stuck out. We gasped at everything.

The car was probably fake.

Now, about the time I nearly passed out. We used to play softball every recess. I was actually quite good and had the knack of hitting homeruns. My timing has always been above average and I could swing the bat with the best of them before I put on too much weight. Anyway, I never had to suffer the indignity of being the last one chosen when teams were picked. I always was around the third or fourth one picked.

Of course, we never wore shoes to school, and that put me down one day. We were playing softball one day before school started. I was rounding second base when I stepped on a stone that punctured my right foot near my big toe. I guess it hit the bone, because I felt this shock go up my leg and right into my head.

I didn't think of it any more until the flag bell rang and we all had to stand at attention until the second flag bell rang, the signal that the flag had been raised. While I was standing at attention, I became aware of the pain in my foot. Everything around me started to light up and I had this massive "white-out" where everything dissolved into light. In retrospect, I guess I went into shock.

I stumbled into class where Mrs. Baptiste promptly took me to the nurse's station and lay me down on the bed to rest. She asked me what I had to eat that morning and I told her I had a hard-boiled egg, bacon, toast and milk. She then repeated that to the rest of the class (I could hear her through the wall), which gasped in unison.

I figure the way she said "hard-boiled egg" made it sound as though it were a bad breakfast, and that the kids instantly perceived the hard-boiled egg as a "bad" thing and reacted with a pseudo-intelligent gasp (as if they knew better than my mom). Goes to show you how much influence a grade-school teacher has on adolescents.

A bunch of us kids took judo lessons in the fourth grade. Now there was an experience. Our judo teacher was a bonsan who had just arrived from Japan. He was a black belt and an accomplished judo expert -- relatively young too. I would guess that he was about 30 or so.

That first judo class we attended gave us an opportunity to test out this guy, so we peppered him with questions about where he had been, what he had done, and how he liked Hilo. More than anything else, we liked his Japanese accent and the way he murdered the English language.

"I rike Hawaii," he told us. "I was pirot in Japan." A pirate?
Really? So did he fight during the war? "Yesu."
Did he help bomb Pearl Harbor? "Yesu."

Yesu? I reported this to my parents that evening and I remember Dad shaking his head and saying the sensei better not go around telling people that or he'd get into trouble. Personally, I think he was just trying to position himself and impress his young charges. He never mentioned Pearl Harbor after that.

We'd meet for judo class every Wednesday afternoon for an hour after Japanese school ended. And at every practice for the first three weeks, all he'd do was make us practice falling on our backs ("Justo fawru bahku -- pa-tah! Rike dat! Andu slappu yo ahmuzu on gloundu!")

Actually, it was kind of fun. There were some older boys in the class -- some toughies, in fact-- and that was the only chance we got to push them to the ground. They loved it. In fact, everybody was going around practicing how to fall.

Eventually, we got around to the part where the sensei taught us how to do the basic leg sweeps and throws. "Yuzu his momentum. Yuzu his momentum." I remember going home with some pretty sore ankles and bruised hips week after week after being swept by an opponent. My only consolation was that everyone else's ankles were probably just as sore.

Then, we progressed to the part where you actually competed, and wrestled with your opponent once he (or you) hit the ground. That's where things got serious. That's where learning how to fall really paid off.

If you failed to counter a move and didn't "yuzu his momentum," and got thrown over your opponent's shoulder flat on your back, you could get the wind knocked out of you as he moved in quickly to apply a suffocating headlock. We were taught that -- move in quick on our opponent as soon as he hit the ground, and pin him to submission. Real macho stuff. Unless you were the one on the ground -- then it was not a manly situation to be in, and no fun at all.

"You clying!?!" "NO, SENSEI!" Hell no. If sensei caught you crying, you were chastised, crucified and mortified. We didn't cry. We were tough men. We were masters of the martial arts. Well, okay, so we were 10-year-old cry-babies.

I competed in a couple of tournaments. I always won my first two or three matches, but then would blow it to the older guys. Not so good, not quite the samurai I thought I was. Most of us didn't return for the second year -- but it was fun while it lasted. And it impressed the girls -- not that I cared about girls anyway.

A word about the music and social climate in the mid-50s. Life in Hilo was quite peaceful in the period between World War II and the Vietnam era.

The Korean "conflict" was underway, but no one seemed to pay much attention to it. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the country was hunky dory, and everybody was busy getting along with their lives and striving to fulfill their great American dream.

Then, along came the first stirrings of rock and roll in music. We never were too affected by this "jungle music" (as our parents called it) in the early days. After all, Hawaii was about six months to a year behind the times in everything social and fashionable. And remember, we were still fourth-grade kids more interested in shooting marbles in the dust, and whacking a softball far enough to reach the Easter Seals building.

I do remember hearing some strange songs on the radio, but I thought nothing of it. What it was, of course, was Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly, and Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley -- the legends of rock and roll. We'd talk about it, and how we all loved it, but I bet if you had polled us, you wouldn't have found more than three kids in the entire fourth grade who knew what they were talking about.

Since the mid-50s, rock and roll music has always served as a barometer of how things were going in the country (and to a lesser degree, in Hawaii). In retrospect, maybe I should have paid more attention to things like that; but in Hawaii, in Mrs. Baptiste's fourth-grade class, I just didn't care about the social climate.

You could tell when the end of the school year was near. We'd do a lot of singing in class, and we'd go on excursions. In elementary school at least, it seems that the teachers planned their lessons so that they'd have some leeway at the end of the school year -- just in case we fell behind in our studies for some reason or another. You know, like the school burns down, or they have to close school for a week, cheery things like that.

We really got into singing during May of 1954. I learned all kinds of neat songs like "If I Should Ever Travel" and "I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts." Socially redeeming songs with meaningful messages.

Apparently these songs were being taught in other schools as well. The Yoshidas (Norman and his brother) lived near Obachan's house. We used to get together on weekends (remember, I used to spend Friday nights at Obachan's house) and sing songs, and they knew the same songs I did. I had a pretty good voice with a nice vibrato, but I remember Norman telling me not to sing that way or I'd ruin my voice. But I didn't listen to him, and I didn't ruin my voice anyway. So there.

The few weeks preceding the summer of 1954 were a little special to me. That summer, we were to visit Mom's family in Sacramento. I even got to leave school a week early.

The day I was to leave, we all were singing songs in class and Mrs. Baptiste asked if there were any particular song I'd like to hear before Dad arrived to pick me up. Yup. "If I Should Ever Travel." Real original. But then I'm a real original kind of guy.

Richard Crozier was considerably more studious that the rest of us (he always won the spelling bees), and he asked me to bring him back a live bat from the mainland — he'd heard they were plentiful and easy to catch since they stuck in peoples' hair.

Sure, I said, no problem. Consider the deed done. Naturally, I saw neither hide nor hair of anything that remotely resembled a bat when I was on the mainland, and I ashamedly went to school empty-handed the very first day of fifth grade. Richard was so disappointed.

We took a long plane trip that summer. Mom, and Dayle, and Audrey, and Eric, and I. The first leg of the trip was from Hilo to Honolulu. No direct flights from Hilo to the mainland in those days (come to think of it, there are no direct flights these days either).

We were all to spend the summer months in Sacramento at our mainland obachan's house. Dad accompanied us to Honolulu, and we got to spend the night in the historic Alexander Young Hotel at the corner of Hotel and Bishop Streets. It felt pretty strange.

Anyway, the next day Dad installed us on the airplane -- a United Airlines DC-6 -- and we prepared ourselves for a long 8-hour flight to San Francisco. The first thing that Mom told me as we strapped ourselves in was "Be sure to pray that we don't crash." Oh, great . . . just what I needed.

I had never forgotten the movie, "The High And The Mighty," starring John Wayne as a pilot of a DC-6 that encountered mechanical problems on the Honolulu-San Francisco run just as it passed the "point of no return."

It was a harrowing (but thankfully un-prophetic) movie. On that summer day, as I sat strapped in with Mom whispering those words in my ear, I could just imagine John Wayne sweating in the cockpit, whistling the movie's theme song.

Actually, the flight was boring, and uneventful.

I remember two more important things. The first was Mom telling her sisters (Auntie Fumi and Auntie May) as soon as we arrived that she'd bet that my head was larger than any of theirs. Now what did that mean?I looked in the mirror quite often during the next couple of days.

The second thing that sticks in my mind is Uncle Kenzi taking a look at our plane, then at a QANTAS plane, then back at ours, and saying, "Jeez, your plane is small!" It's a good thing he wasn't in Honolulu to say that before we took off, or I'd never have gotten on the plane in the first place.