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Just as Delegate Farrington did when he was a boy, children of kamaainas (oldtimers) went off to school wearing their shoes, came home carrying them in their hands. They tobogganed down grassy slopes on ti plant leaves, frisked on palm-fringed beaches and swam in the creamy surf.
White mothers worried about their small fry picking up pidgin English—but not about their barefoot habits. A few who could afford it sent their children to high school and college on the mainland —particularly their daughters. On soft tropic nights there was too much "aloha" in the air. "I think it's safer to send them away," said one mother, "even if they do come back as frosted little snobs."
The temperature was in the 70s, as it almost always is. The bland northeast trade winds rustled everlastingly through the palms. On the famed narrow crescent of the beach at Waikiki, the malihinis (newcomers) loafed around the salmon-colored Royal Hawaiian Hotel (rates: $12 to $125 a day), the neighboring Moana, the rambling, swank Halekulani. Some lay languorously on the sand, or skinned their knees trying to ride the marching surf. The tourist business, nipped by the war, was beginning to recover.
Hotels furnished chilled ripe pineapples for the visitors, ladled out free pineapple juice, put on hula dances for amateur photographers. Every Saturday night at the Royal Hawaiian, George Kainapau, Honolulu's most popular singer, crooned in falsetto Aloha Oe (Farewell to Thee) and Ke Kali Nei An (Waiting for Thee).
The Word from Boston. The modern story of Eden began in 1778 when the British explorer, Captain James Cook, landed on the islands, first to be welcomed by the natives as a god, later to be killed in a petty melee. The natives were of trackless origin. They had no written language, but they were storytellers and great orators—large and brown, polygamous and polyandrous. They were held in durance only by the tabus and superstitions of their polytheistic religion, which they renounced in 1819 after the death of their great King Kamehameha I.
Traders and whalers followed Cook. In 1820 came Protestant missionaries from Boston, bearing printing presses, Mother Hubbard dresses, Bibles and the gospel word. A few of them and many of their friends and relatives branched out briskly into other businesses. They traded and planted sugar cane. The archipelago began to hum. The fortunes of the new enterprisers budded.
The native population, however, sadly declined. When Cook landed, there were some 300,000 natives in the archipelago. Seventy-five years later, chiefly because of the white man's diseases, their numbers had dwindled to 70,000. The islands' invaders, who had to have workers for the canefields, turned their eyes overseas for contract labor.