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Keaau celebrates
school’s 100 years

By Rod Thompson
Big Island correspondent

KEAAU, Hawaii -- Attending school south of Hilo during World War I, Ed Nakamura used to draw pictures of America's adversary, the spike-helmeted German Kaiser. It earned him the nickname "Kaiser."

Nakamura met a tougher adversary the day he poked his knee into another student in a school line.

Oma Duncan, the strict disciplinarian principal of Olaa School, pulled him over her knee and spanked him in front of the entire student body.

Duncan continued as principal for 41 years. As an adult, Nakamura returned to teach at the school while Duncan still ruled.

On Saturday, at age 93, Nakamura served as grand marshall of a parade through Keaau, part of festivities marking the 100th anniversary of the former Olaa School, which started in 1900 with three classrooms.

It was later named Keaau School and has now become Keaau Middle School as elementary students have moved to a new campus down the road.

The celebration included entertainment, food, historical displays, and in the parade, "shopping cart floats" pushed by school groups.

Alumni have put together a commemorative cookbook with a lengthy historical section.

Duncan, principal from 1906 to 1947, was "harsh, strict, intimidating," an anonymous commentator says in the cookbook.

But she clearly had children's welfare at heart.

In 1933, when Duncan learned that the father of five children had died and their mother was in the hospital, leaving a 4-year-old at home without an adult caretaker, she ordered the child brought to school the next day.

In September 1927, Shizuko Akamine, born in February, was too young to start school, so entered a "receiving class" in 1928. Like all her classmates, she went to school barefoot.

School lunch was just 3 cents, but with 10 children in the family, her shoe repairman father couldn't afford it. She brought rice and soybeans from home.

"I envied people who could buy lunch," Akamine said. She got free lunches when she was assigned to work in the kitchen.

During World War II, the school was used as an army barracks. Classes were held in empty store fronts and churches, the cookbook says.

"We all carried our gas masks (supplied by the government) every day to school," says an unnamed person in the cookbook.

For Akamine, the war meant new freedom. Her parents and her friends' parents, foreign-born, couldn't leave Keaau without a pass.

Akamine, born in America, could drive to Hilo whenever she pleased. "We called the shots now," she said.

Fifth-graders Colleen Pryor and Trenton Aurello are among the students videotaping oral history interviews with elders like Nakamura and Akamine.

Pryor thought it "kind of harsh" that students in those days could be rapped on the knuckles or their palms.

Aurello was amazed that people left their houses unlocked and the milkman would walk in to put milk in the icebox.

People who remember those days are disappearing. Eventually, the original schoolhouse will disappear, too. Among its faults are that it is noisy, dark, and not accessible for handicapped people, said custodian Joe Gomes.

Plans at the Department of Education call for it to be torn down some day and replaced with a playground, said school-parent liaison Marie Bricker.