Kauai Kids in Peace and WW Two

Download or read book Kauai Kids in Peace and WW Two written by Bill Fernandez and published by . This book was released on 2013-01-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Half-Native Hawaiian Bill Fernandez spent his first ten years on the tiny Pacific island of Kauai in and around the ocean. There was no money and no place to spend it, so he and his pals made their own surfboards from wooden ironing boards, a canoe from flattened tin roofing and road tar, and fought kite battles with their newspaper and poi paste kites. This idyllic life was shattered when Pearl Harbor was bombed on the next island in 1941. Gas masks curfews, food and gasoline rationing and racism against his Japanese American friends filled his days. But he adapted and made a shoe shine kit to polish GI shoes when 40,000 arrived to defend the island and train. Running errands to get candy and cigarettes filled his jean pockets with coins. But he worried about family and friends threatened with imprisonment because of their race. Bill dedicates Part Two to the Nisei (Japanese American) soldiers. Filled with old photographs the reader is drawn back in time to his island days. The book ends when he is sent to Honolulu to Kamehameha Schools for children of Hawaiian ancestry.