When members of Waiakea Kai Elementary School’s 1954 kindergarten class reunited last month, there were laughs, hugs and even a few tears.
When members of Waiakea Kai Elementary School’s 1954 kindergarten class reunited last month, there were laughs, hugs and even a few tears.
Some pored over an aerial map displayed in the Coconut Grill meeting room, depicting the streets and landmarks of the old Waiakea Town. Others browsed through dated photos showing former teachers and old classmates. Many swapped stories.
“This is the one event I didn’t want to miss,” said classmate Charlie Ah Toong, 67, who now lives on Oahu, pointing to an area on the map where his childhood home — a two-story house with a mango tree — once stood. “It meant the most to me over everything else. This one was a little more personal. These are the guys you grew up with.”
Waiakea Kai was one of several feeder schools that held reunion events as part of the Hilo High School class of 1967’s 50th reunion.
But Waiakea Kai was unique from the rest: The school itself no longer exists. It was damaged — and ultimately closed — after the May 23, 1960, tsunami slammed into Hilo, killing 61 people and devastating the majority of homes and buildings in the Waiakea area.
The Waiakea Kai students were fifth-graders when the tsunami hit. School closed for the remainder of the year. For their final sixth-grade year, some returned to school — the elementary portion of the Waiakea Kai building was still usable. Many scattered to other schools, however, because their homes were destroyed and they had to relocate.
Waiakea Kai, which was located on what’s now part of the Banyans Golf Club, soon closed permanently. It was replaced by Waiakea Elementary School, built in 1963 on Puainako Street out of the tsunami evacuation zone.
Ultimately, schooling for the Waiakea Kai fifth-graders ended that year “very abruptly for everyone,” classmate Karen (Isemoto) Chang, 67, said. Many classmates didn’t reconnect until intermediate school the following year, or years later in high school. Others never reconnected.
“We always wondered, ‘Where did they go?’” Chang said. “So this reunion is actually bringing us the closure of our elementary school experience that we didn’t have way back then … We didn’t finish sixth grade like we were supposed to and happily go onto the next level. We had a traumatic event occur that stayed with us all these years. But now, I think many of us can kind of put things to rest because we are having this opportunity to share our stories. This became more than just a reunion event, it was a necessity and something we needed to have happen.”
A total of 27 Waiakea Kai classmates — nearly half the original kindergarten class — flew in for the Oct. 27 reunion, themed “Small town roots, lifetime friends.” One classmate came as far as New Zealand.
Some shared their experiences from the tsunami with the Tribune-Herald.
Toong said he was asleep in bed when the 35-foot wave struck just after 1 a.m. He remembers his father rushing into his room and scurrying him downstairs as water filled the stairwell.
“My dad woke me up, I got up and I was up to my ankles in water,” Toong recalled. “And he said ‘Let’s go.’ … (When the water receded) I remember there were like three families all walking, my dad had a flashlight and he was shining it around, and there was just mud and muck everywhere. He goes off and he comes back and he finds a kid who was in the muck. He was a couple years younger than I.”
Classmate Ian Sakai, 67, whose home was washed away, returned to Waiakea Kai for the sixth grade. He remembers a smell similar to mud permeating the school building.
“It was a weird smell,” Sakai said. “If I think about it now I can still smell it.”
Kay (Miyashiro) Shintani, 67, whose family founded Cafe 100, said the wave hit just after her dad had returned from checking on the restaurant. Her house was uprooted she said, and she remembers floating until being stopped by a mango tree. She recalls wading through water in her dark living room and hearing people screaming and moaning.
Shintani said she never learned what happened to her classmates — or the Waiakea Kai school — after the tsunami. Her parents never allowed her to return to Waiakea Town because “they wanted to protect us from death and destruction.” She said she didn’t know until this year that some of her classmates even attended sixth grade at Waiakea Kai.
“I think we all have a sense of resilience because we’ve gone through this,” Shintani said. “If you go talk to the people who come from Waiakea Town, there are a lot of very successful people who came out of here … because they have lived in these kinds of circumstances and they have that spirit in them … to keep going. When something bad happens to you, you heed it and you just keep going because you have to persevere … And I think that’s a byproduct we all picked up.”
Email Kirsten Johnson at kjohnson@hawaiitribune-herald.com.