My Sundays are usually devoted to something spiritual, and sometimes personal.  About the latter topic, in May of 2014 I began a 15-part series on my life transitions.    Part 1   dealt with an overview and my early youth, while  Part 15E  a couple months later was on the afterlife. Transitions  6  and 7 caught my attention, so today, I'll focus on one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1958, off I flew to Los Angeles.  This was the first time I had left Hawaii, and this was perhaps my most monumental transition: I was fortunate that my older brother was a structural engineer with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, California.  He got me a slot as a draftsman there and I also stayed with he and his family the whole summer ( and repeated this two more times, with the summer between my junior and senior years in Hilo, Hawaii with C. Brewer--where the   little league baseball team   pla...

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 ...

I just watched: Woodstock:  Three Days That Defined A Generation This was  a 1 hr 36 min American Experience PBS documentary first aired at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019. However, you can now see it on Prime... but only until August 31 for FREE .   Rotten Tomatoes  liked it, bestowing 86/84 scores. Christy Lemire indicated,  It does bring a freshness to a story that we've heard a million times , and Glenn Kenny of the  New York Time s said:   Uses the perspective of nearly 50 years' hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess. For me, it was a trip down a memory lane that I never took.   Read my link to this event: In August of 1969 my wife and I were driving from Baton Rouge to Montreal to interact with the remnants of the recent World Expo.  We spent the night in Hershey, Pennsylvania to visit the chocolate company....

60 years ago, for my first job, I became a sugar engineer with C. Brewer in Naalehu within Kau on the Big Island of Hawaii.   Next door 12 miles away was Pahala, where I found my wife, Pearl.   34 miles further was The Volcanoes National Park. Hilo was another 22 miles ( 66 miles from Naalehu ), and at my arrival in this southernmost point of the U.S., there was no television nor radio reception in these two sugar cities.  Not sure if there was any area in the continental USA where this was possible.  The reason was Mauna Loa, which blocked signals.  At night you could with the right equipment listen to some radio static. About the history of this region, not  much happened in Kau until in 1868 when there was  a 7.9 Richter quake  which produced a tsunami devastating coastal villages, and five days later triggering a Mauna Loa eruption ( yellow spot below ), forming an 18-mile fissure, and fountains of 1000 feet, where lava entered the s...