Chapter 4: Adventure Begins

[Hotel street today courtesy of Google Earth. I would be lost, totally]

In my new home I’d suddenly suffered about two weeks of epic new allergies but got over that, antibodies assumed. I tried out a new product pill called Contact, one of the very first TV advertised remedies for hay fever. It may have had a positive placebo effect or not but I lived to see another day, by far the worst hay fever attack ever.

But I should not complain. The air was so filled with beautiful flower aroma. I’d be damned if I was going to give up on paradise, however, and all these new things I had to learn while hitting the ground running.

There were BIG cock roaches and other giant bugs plus the pidgin English requiring a close ear, work, learning in order to sound local. I had to learn how to use, wear, Flip Flops, sandals, Go Aheads that hurt between your big toe and the next. Didn’t understand those but everybody removed them before going in the house, required. I needed some Aloha shirts. I had to change my driver’s license. I needed a car.

I bought a car from my brother in law’s older brother. It was a 1950 Austin sedan, the kind hot rodders loved to put Chevy V-8’s in. This was stock, actually had a mechanical sun roof you cranked open. The A40 motor was one copied around the world even for Japanese production WW2 fighter plane engines. All these things included made me proud of my funny old little black sedan that leaked engine oil. But it provided me with transportation to work for quite a while including my start at Repo Auto Center.

Just after I first arrived on Oahu I started looking for a job. I answered an ad in the Star Bulletin newspaper regarding a gas station job in downtown Honolulu. Pumping gas I had experience for.

I Looked for work and landed a job with Ken Shinn a former office manager who was staking his life savings to re open a Texaco station near Hotel Street in old Honolulu. This was the tough part of town. That would be my work before college started and before Repo Auto. The experience was one of working nights in the wild environment of Hotel Street and being quick educated in the night life of Hawaii’s locals. This was immersion, intense.

I helped open Ken Shinn’s Texaco just around the corner from Hotel Street, mere feet away in the old part of Honolulu, the tough part of town down by the harbor. I didn’t know one part of the city from the other having just arrived in Hawaii myself. I was a fresh haole without direction aside from waiting to start the Spring semester at college after quitting commercial art and enduring a long recovery from a traffic accident back in the mainland. I did have my sister and brother in law for support and guidance and they let me stay at their house until I got myself establish in this new part of the world. I was 19 years old, naive and nearly broke.

Ken was full of enthusiasm, his life savings being spent to re open the station that had failed more than once. He involved his entire family, even a nephew into the work of getting the station ready for the grand opening, balloons, free Coke, flyers with offers for a cheap lube job and so forth, the usual fare.

Ken was an office manager. He’d never run a gas station before and his knowledge of mechanics very limited.

His family was traditional Korean, the eldest son being the recipient of, lets say, all the blessings in what we haoles would refer to as a spoiled brat. The teenage kid did no work while the rest of us labored to clean up the dusty building, the entire property, to make it show ready for all the new customers about the flood the place. The kid just sat in the office and played his guitar while Ken’s giddy smile shone everywhere as he coaxed us to hurry up.

He wanted us to run to the pump island when a customer drove up; “Okay to trot but no walking,” was the command. He had a vacuum cleaner standing ready at the island plugged in and aside from the 1965 norm of offering full service, check the oil and tires, wash the windshield, also offer to vacuum the interior of the car. All of that for the going gasoline price of 39.9 cents per gallon. And as the grand opening unfolded we also had to hand them a large bottle of Coke, balloons for the kids and be happy about it. I was making $1.50 per hour.