A Whole New Ballgame

Ha’aheo Elementary was a typical plantation camp school, usually one class and one classroom per grade. We sat next to the same person throughout our tenure there, occasionally however, the teacher would reassign seating if we got too rambunctious. It was a safe and happy time, even with 15x15 ft 4-tiered rusty jungle gyms, overhead bars and swing sets on dirt, splintered see-saw seats, and games of kickball, tag, dodgeball, football, baseball, “Roll Bat” or “Strike-o-catch” (loved this game!)…the image of kids scrambling around the yard and balls of all sizes whizzing about brings back fond memories.

Hilo Intermediate (grades 7, 8, 9 back then) was a mind blower…from a school of approx. 150 kids, to a school of close to a thousand, it was overwhelming…but exciting!  Changing classrooms, new girls, sitting next to a new student every hour, new girls, eating in a cafeteria, new girls…  On the downside though, plantation camp kids were fresh meat and had to persevere through the gauntlet of upper classmen, mainly city and project kids who felt they owned the school; it was brutal, but it made us tougher, faster and wiser.

With a new crop of girls to be distracted by, my interest in photography took a back seat to trying to impress the blushing “city” beauties with my backwoods survival skills…didn’t work, neither did photography skills, which, BTW, were still terrible (by my today’s standards), they all shied away. I had a Kodak Instamatic by then, but shelved it because of rejection…

4-H revived my journey in photography. I took on a photography project in the 9th grade which involved; using upgraded equipment, processing the film we exposed into negatives for printing, and creating a print in a darkroom…I was re-hooked, the darkroom was a whole new ballgame! I would be using sensitive, fragile equipment, protective gear and reasonably safe chemicals…I would be playing with “Big Boy” toys!

Incidentally, my photography was never recognized as “works of art”, it was more like ”…uh, I kinda get it…”.

*(Side note: I worked at a B&W photolab for a while…processing and printing rolls of 35mm and 120mm film…great images are made greater in the darkroom.)

Hilo High (grades 10, 11 and 12, approx. 2100 students then) was the only show in town, except for St. Joseph, but that doesn’t count (jk)…and when the other intermediate school’s freshmen were added to ours, the sophomore class numbered close to 800…more new girls! I was a band geek by then and my interest turned to playing trumpet and being a student conductor, so it didn’t matter…

I learned much in class, but; “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

(not certain to whom it is attributed, either A. Einstein or Y. Berra…go figure…)

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I finally paid attention…