21
DisasterMan
This is why the descendents of the fi rst Bostonian missionaries
were all millionaires a hundred years later. The Castles, the
Cooks, the Baldwins, etc., all sent their children to schools
back in Boston -- usually including Harvard.
McKinley High School
I entered the 10
th
grade at McKinley high School in
Honolulu in 1930. It was the only public high school on the
island of Oahu in the Territory of Hawaii. McKinley High
School was established in 1865. When I arrived at McKinley,
at that time there were three other high schools on the island
of Oahu. Kamehameha School was special in that you had to
be Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian to go there. There were lots
of part Hawaiian children -- Norwegian/Hawaiian children
thanks to the crews of the Norwegian whaling ships which
had stopped briefl y in Hawaii to get fresh drinking water and
food, Chinese/Hawaiian children whose Chinese fathers had
been persuaded by the Hawaiian sugar planters to come from
Canton to work in the sugar cane fi elds, and so on. Bernice
Pauahi Bishop, the last direct descendant of King Kamehameha
had left a lot of money in 1887 in her will (the Bishop estate is
now worth about ten billion dollars) to endow the school for
Hawaiian children. There was a Catholic school for Catholic
children, the St. Louis School, and then there was Punahou,
an expensive private school.
The Bostonian missionaries had built a school in 1820
called Oahu College. In 1930 it was a private residential school
now called Punahou which had all grades including high
school grades. Punahou has always been expensive. In the
Gold Rush years beginning in 1850 or so, the California gold
miners would send their children by sailing ship to Hawaii
to attend Oahu College because of the good reputation of the
teachers from Boston. California had been Spanish or Mexican
for 300 years until 1846 and all the schools in California were
taught in Spanish when the gold miners arrived from New
York, Baltimore and other East Coast ports. There was a lot
of news in the sports pages of newspapers a few years ago
about Michele Wie, a Punahou senior who wanted to play