Hydrangea Waving by Joe Hale

Author:Joe Hale [HALE, JOE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7414-7086-7
Publisher: Infinity Publishing
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17 To Washington, D.C.

After graduation from Punahou School I worked the summer with Jameson Akina, one of the Akina boys, at a moving company known as HC&D. Honolulu Construction and Draying was affectionately called hot coffee and donuts by the popular dj of the time, J. Aku Head Pupule.

The work was mostly delivering household goods to people’s home or packing belongings to be shipped out. It was not rocket science but there were tricks of the trade one needed to learn. It was hard labor and the men there had worked at it for a long time. They took pride in navigating refrigerators and other large objects with finesse when the job sites were walk ups with narrow stairways.

Usually after packing things at a customer’s home, their items were re-organized in the warehouse and packed into specialty cartons and some were crated. The permanent staff was good at their jobs. I felt a bit guilty since we summer help had to correct and re-do some of the crating or packing.

In late August of 1956 I left Honolulu and headed for Washington, DC.

I had been accepted at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. While at Punahou, like all of my classmates, I had applied to a number of colleges on the mainland. I was accepted at GU and at George Washington, University of Maryland and I think a conditional acceptance at Princeton. I chose GU really not knowing a great deal except for the fact I had some notion of being in the diplomatic service which might enable me to be assigned one day to Japan and be closer to my mother.

I flew from Honolulu to New York where I met Mr. Hale’s brother Alan for the first time. Alan Hale was an actor and he had lived in New York’s Lambs’ Club for years. From there, my travel agent in Honolulu had booked me on a train to Washington. I stayed for a couple of nights at the Willard Hotel located near the White House.

Before leaving Hawaii, a Georgetown student from Hawaii, back for the summer, contacted me to consider joining him and another guy from Hawaii to share an apartment in DC. This was an unexpected idea as it was assumed that I would live at school. After doing the necessary things at school, I decided to accept the invitation. Francis was Chinese-American born in Honolulu and Frank was part Hawaiian. They were really nice people and being with them made me feel at home.

The apartment was located on Sunderland Place, near Dupont Circle in Northwest DC. Even though it was early September, some of the early mornings and nights were decidedly cooler than what I had been use to in Hawaii. The building where we all moved into was a three-story red brick structure with steps going up to the entrance from the street. It was the kind of a building I had seen in movies about New York City. There were other tenants in the same building including several girls who seemed to be office workers.

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