Introduction
1529 Auld Lane was more than a place: It was definitely a state-of-mind. In the early 1950s it was home to several families of Puerto Rican ancestry. It had a culture that was insular, special and unique. Even now in 2020, it has a strange attraction, and affection for those people who formerly lived there. I was raised in Auld Lane, and these are my recollection. I’m Toofie, and this is my Auld Lane story.
What’s In A Name?
Auld Lane was not always called by that name. Its original name was Rice Mill Road, because of all the rice fields that surrounded it. Young Ahin, an immigrant from China arrived in Hawaii in 1872. He was 17 years old and essentially penniless. Young Ahin started out as a truck gardener selling produce in the environs of Honolulu. With the help of relatives he started Tung Sun Wai Plantation, a rice farm, in the neighborhood where Auld Lane is located. Young Ahin started to buy more land in the area with the financial help of a haole (Caucasian) who lent him the money for the purchases. Ahin’s farm increased to several hundred acres of rice fields. He later controlled rice farms located in Waikiki, Moanalua, Halawa, Waipio, Kalauao, Waipaau, and Kawaihapai, and on Kauai, at Hanalei. Young Ahin’s income increased considerably. He later started a business called the ChinWo Co., that was involved in the export of rice, imported products from China, and the investing in real estate. He owned numerous properties in Honolulu. The rent from his properties in 1900 amounted to a staggering $2000 a month, which in today’s dollars equals to about $60,000. He became one the wealthiest men of Chinese ancestry in Hawaii. Later, Ahin started to sell off, or lease parcels of his rice farm, and began to build homes and stores on the properties. That’s how Auld Lane evolved into residential and commercial areas, instead of just farm land.
Auld Lane became the proper name for Rice Mill Road in the 1920s. It was renamed for William Auld, who had lived in the area. William Auld was the son of Scottish seaman Alexander Auld, who settled in Hawaii from Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland in 1810. William Auld was an aide to King Kalakaua. He later became a very successful businessman in Honolulu. You may find it interesting to know that auld is the Scottish word for old. Auld Lane was located roughly between North King St., and North School Street. It was about 2 ½ miles long.
Beginnings
My family, that is my mother and father, myself, along with my aunties Irene, Lorraine, and uncle Johnny (my mother’s younger siblings), moved to Auld Lane from the Manoa Housing Project, which no longer exists. This was in 1951. My sisters Beverly, and Cheryl had not been born yet. The duplex that we moved into was very old, and my mother was reluctant to make the move. Our duplex had three bedrooms, no hot water, and a kerosene stove in the kitchen. The floor was bare wood covered with linoleum, which we euphemistically referred to as “rugs”. The duplex did have indoor plumbing though. Illumination was provided by bare light bulbs that hung by wires, from the ceilings. The rent was $16 a month, which was pretty steep for our family to pay. My dad, worked as a groundskeeper for the City and County of Honolulu Board of Water Supply, and made about 75¢ an hour. Do the math, and it comes out to, about $30 a week, and approximately $120 a month. So, $16 for rent was expensive based on my father’s income. Fortunately, food and electricity were relatively cheap. We never had breakfast because our family budget could not sustain three meals a day. Food, needless to say, was never wasted. My uncle Benny Matias moved in with us shortly after we arrived at Auld Lane. He had a disability pension, and he helped with the family expenses. It is interesting to note that all of the residents of Auld Lane shared one mailbox. My mother would send me daily to check the mail. I had to sort through it, and find the mail that belonged to my family. Not long after moving to Auld Lane, my father got a better job as a rigger at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, and his monthly income increased.
I started school at the Na Lei Kindergarten, and my mother used to walk me to school every day. The walk was about a mile, and it was challenging for my little feet. As we walked, we sang songs like "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah", “Lavender Blue”, and "The Music Goes Round and Round". I still think about the memories of those walks with fond nostalgia.
Living Conditions
The duplex was infested with rats. The living room floor of the duplex was sloped, so the rats used to skid across the linoleum floor as they came barreling out from the kitchen hallway. We had pet names for some of the rats. There was one rat who liked to stop and watch some TV. I guess even rats need some entertainment occasionally. (A TV was actually purchased long after we moved in.)
Soon after moving in a proper stove was purchased. This was essential for many reasons, chiefly because we did not have a hot water heater. To take a bath, one had to heat pots of water on the stove, and pour it into the bathtub. Lukewarm water was then added to adjust the temperature. As a child I really did not notice this inconvenience. Because of this “incomplete” bathing experience, it was not really a hygienic process: I began to develop many boils on the back of my legs. They had to be lanced by a physician.
My parents in all their collective wisdom, decided one day to buy an automatic washer machine, because my mother was washing clothes using a wringer washer. Well, the new washer was purchased and installed in the kitchen. That was not a good idea. When the washer was turned on for the first time, it did a violent boogie woogie that shook the whole house to its core. The walls almost came apart! Needless to say, the washer was moved outside, and installed on a concrete slab that was constructed just for it.
Zukemura Store
In 1946, Chibin Zukemura who was an immigrant from Okinawa, opened the Zukemura Store in Auld Lane. It was located in a building that originally housed the Kam Pui Store. Zukemura Store sold an eclectic mix of sundry items. The shelves were stocked literally from floor to ceiling with all kinds of merchandise. Chibin used a mechanical arm to snag items that were shelved beyond his reach. Chibin was a very early practitioner of micro lending, which is a rather modern concept. In this regard, Chibin was way before his time. This is how his micro lending system worked. Since most of the residents of Auld Lane lived below the poverty level, towards the end of the month, many of them were short of cash to buy groceries. Chibin developed a system he called “charge”. For example, if my mother needed a dozen eggs, and didn’t have the cash on hand to buy it, she would send me to Zukemura Store, to “charge” the purchase of the eggs. Chibin kept track of all the “charge” accounts in a little notebook. He would keep a running tally of the purchases using an abacus. Chibin and his wife Kameko ran the store, and being immigrants, their English was not very good. I was in the store one day when a haole boy came in and told Kameko that he wanted to “buy some butter”. Kameko seemed puzzled, and kept saying “butter, butter, we don’t sell butter.” She was confused, and repeated it several more times. Finally, her son James, who was helping out in the store said, “Ma, he wants butta.” Kameko said “Oh, OK, butta. We have that”. Kameko outlived Chibin who passed away in 1969 at the age of 64. Kameko died in 2014, at the age of 100.
The Auld Lane Spiritual Ecosystem
This section should be subtitled ghosts, apparitions, hauntings, feiticeiras (a type of witch), and the Mulher de Boush, literally bush lady. In our house apparitions were commonplace. We saw these ghostly manifestations all the time, not to mention visions of little people, who liked to walk in the hallway that lead from the kitchen into the parlor. They would sometime leave tiny footprints on the ceiling.
One of the most mysterious ailments that afflicted the children of Auld Lane was the boush (bush). The common symptoms of this were unusual pain and tenderness of the stomach. This was commonly thought to be caused by a minor demonic possession of the child. To alleviate this problem a bush lady was brought in to do the exorcism. In our neighborhood there were three bush ladies. One of them was Helen Mendez, the godmother of my sister Cheryl, Auntie Silvana (sister of Minnie, my maternal grandmother), and Natalia. The exorcism consisted of rubbing, and massaging castor oil on the child’s stomach while chanting certain prayers. The stomach was then wrapped up in a tight cloth. My auntie Lorraine had the bush ritual performed on her several times by auntie Silvana. I had the bush exorcism done on me by Helen Mendez. I still remember it to this day, because it was done in a dark room, lit only by candles. It was rather spooky. Interestingly, Dr. King Chee Chock, of the now defunct Chock-Pang Clinic in Honolulu, had many Puerto Rican patients, and he was steeped in their lore, and traditions. He was convinced of the existence of the bush phenomenon, and would sometime refer patients to a bush lady for treatment.
There was a mango tree just down the way from our duplex that was haunted at night by a lady dressed in white. Many people saw her. My paternal grandfather Papa Hino saw her one night when he was coming home late from work. She scared the living daylights out of him. From then on he carried a powerful flashlight with him whenever he walked home at night past that mango tree.
Roaming spirits also haunted Auld Lane. We would hear them walking around outside our house at night. They would whistle and call our names. I experienced this exact same phenomena when I used to work at a mortuary. It is very unnerving.
My maternal grandmother, Grandma Minnie was accused by several family members of being a feiticeira (witch), because she had a penchant for putting curses on people. It just so happened that my father was home one day, and overheard her putting a curse on me. He got so mad he knocked her to the ground, and made her leave the house immediately. He told her never to return.
In the 1940s and 1950s, it was the custom for some Puerto Rican families to have the bodies of their deceased brought home for the funeral. Pepe Rosario, who was elderly, lived in the duplex next to ours. When he died, his family brought the body home for the funeral. I was about five years old at this time. I was extremely frightened to realize that there was a dead body just next door. Even at that age, I knew that a very thin wall separated our apartment from the funeral, and all the wailing, and crying that occurred. You could also smell the flowers in our apartment. I still have nightmares from that experience!
Auntie Silvana’s Sweet Bread Shoppe
Auntie Silvana was the sister of Minerva, my maternal grandmother. When I knew Auntie Silvana she was already in her late sixties. She had retired after many years of working as a forelady at the Dole Pineapple Cannery in Honolulu. This accounted for her incredibly loud voice. A cannery is a very noisy place, and Auntie Silvana had to shout to be heard above the din of the canning machinery as she gave instructions to her workers. Her normal speaking voice sounded like it was coming out of the loudspeakers at Yankee Stadium. We used to joke that she could be heard clearly at the Palama Theater located about a mile away. She was a lovely person though. When I recently asked my elderly Auntie Lorraine about Auntie Silvana, she became positively misty. She absolutely adored Auntie Silvana. Everybody loved her. Auntie Silvana’s favorite phrase was “me dirge”, which is a corruption of the Portuguese phrase “meu Deus”, which translates as “my God”. Her conversations were liberally peppered with that phrase. I really enjoyed it when Auntie Silvana came to our house to bake Portuguese Sweet Bread. That was a trip! It actually was an event, because all of the ladies of Auld Lane came to our kitchen to learn how to bake sweet bread from Auntie Silvana. Yours truly was always in the midst of all this action as a passive observer. In those days you could not buy sweet bread in the local supermarkets, as it was a folkloric delicacy, so to have sweet bread, especially freshly baked, was indeed a treat. Auntie Silvana had a quirky way of interpreting the measuring of the ingredients. For instance, all of the measures were increased by one. For example, if the recipe called for 12 teaspoons of sugar, she would increase it to 13, and justified this by saying “one for the cup”. She did this for all of the ingredients. The ladies in the kitchen would echo “one for the cup” like a well trained Greek chorus after Auntie Silvana’s pronouncement. I found this to be baffling, but it was a bit of Auntie Silvana’s charm. There is nothing like the smell of fresh Sweet Bread baking in the oven.
The Demise Of Auld Lane
In 1960 Auld lane was declared to be unsafe after one of the termite ridden apartments collapsed on its foundation. The whole area was condemned. The city relocated our family to the Palolo Valley Housing. In essence we were moved from one ghetto to another.
Epilogue
This is just a taste of what Auld Lane was like. I hope you enjoyed it.
-Toofie
