I earlier mentioned that my very first airplane flight was when I was around 10-years old from Honolulu to Maui. I was born at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu in 1940. Grew up in Kakaako and when I was in high school, took a trip to Hilo. The first 18 years of my life was otherwise spent on Oahu.
I left in 1962 for Los Angeles to spend the summer living with my older brother, who got me a summer job at the Naval Civil Engineering Center, Port Hueneme, California. Then spent 3.7 years at Stanford University.
During our junior year, most of my friends decided to join the first full year of John Kennedy's just announced Peace Corps when they graduated. So I had to do something similarly sacrificial. To explore my possible future, I found a summer job with C. Brewer in Hilo. Lived in the Boys Club, and adjacent was the little league field of a team I watched. They went all the way to Williamsport for the Little League World Series in 1961.
The Big Island became home after I graduated, finding myself in Naalehu at the Hutchison Sugar Company, with no TV and radio available. This was the southernmost point of the USA. Found a girlfriend, Pearl, in September of 1962, and we got married in December. The draft, loomed, so I joined the Army Reserve, and was sent back to Oahu, Scofield Barracks, for basic training.
After being discharged later in 1963, C. Brewer sent me as a trainee to the Kilauea Sugar Company. In a primary way, my roots are here, for around the 1900 my father's father found his way there, coming via the USA, where he had some advanced skills in engineering and mining, for he was hired as a supervisory employee. I'm named after him, for he was Kenjiro Takahashi. I am Patrick Kenji Takahashi. Kenjiro means first son, and Kenji is the second son. Amazingly enough, he found someone to marry in Kilauea, where they lived. He was the key technical individual who led the building of the first hydroelectric plant on this island, the Wainiha Hydroelectric Facility, in 1906. Unfortunately he fell and died at the site just before the power was officially activated. My father was only 3 years old.
Early in my assignment at Kilauea, a very old man came up to me one day and said he knew my grandfather, and he was buried up on the hill behind the town. He found the gravestone, and I was the first in my family to have this experience in a very long time. More than a decade later his son-in-law led me to the power plant, and said the road from the main highway to this site was informally known as the Takahashi Powerhouse Road.
To quote from an earlier post of five years ago:
In September of 2005, Pearl and I visited Misa Tamura (right), the son-in-law of that older gentleman, to find the gravestone on Kauai. Misa, himself, was well into his 80’s by then, and he asked if we also wanted to see my grandfather’s powerhouse, for somehow, the community even then, a century later, referred to the site as Takahashi’s powerhouse. The Wainiha Powerhouse was commissioned in 1906, and today produces 4 MW with essentially the same incoming pipes and generation equipment. Around this time, my brother, Stan, found the earlier photo and sent me a note that the name on the gravestone was Kenjiro Takahashi. Thus, I learned for the first time that I was named after this grandfather, for my middle name is Kenji.
In 1964 I was sent back to the Big Island to become a process engineer at the Hutchinson Sugar Company in Naalehu. I also was assigned by the U.S. Army to the 442nd Army unit, but was in a control group, for I lived more than 50 miles from Hilo. In time, I decided to return to graduate school. Here, Manager Bill Baldwin, who arranged my date with Pearl, wishing us goodbye.. A decade later, Bill and I shared an office working for Senator Spark Matsunaga in DC. Thus, this Pride of America cruise certainly brought back memories of my life throughout the islands of Hawaii.
After getting a PhD in biochemical engineering from LSU, the rest of my life was essentially spent in Hawaii, almost entirely on Oahu. Had few short assignments with NASA and national labs, worked in the U.S. Senate for three years and took two sabbatical leaves of 6 months in Tokyo, Japan. Left for other business and pleasure trips, and just on Star Alliance, am heading for 3 million miles. In this period I must have driven around the Big Island at least a dozen times to take visitors to our renewable energy sites. A few more trips, of course, to Maui, Molokai and Kauai too. Thus, on this sixth or so Pride of America cruise, did not want to take any tours.
Tomorrow, arrival in Honolulu.
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I earlier mentioned that my very first airplane flight was when I was around 10-years old from Honolulu to Maui. I was born at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu in 1940. Grew up in Kakaako and when I was in high school, took a trip to Hilo. The first 18 years of my life was otherwise spent on Oahu. 
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