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Maui Nei

On a green island on the other side of the world, ancient Celts feared the supernatural on the last night of the year, Oct. 31. Ancient Hawaiians marked every night as a time when spirits could create mischief among the living.

“The people of old sincerely believed and said the ghost gods of the night were spirits of the dead.” So wrote S. N. Holokahiki while a student at William P. Alexander’s Theological School in Wailuku.

The Celts on Ireland, and later Scotland, created myth and lore surrounding what became known as Halloween. In Celtic, the night was call Samhain, pronounced SAH-win. It was a night to be feared. It was believed the spirit of everyone who had died in the previous year came looking for living bodies to inhabit. Defenses were required.

One seminal piece of lore involved Stingy Jack. He tricked the devil into climbing a tree. Stuck in upper boughs, the devil condemned Jack, a hard-drinking farmer, to wander the Earth at night, guided by the flickering light of a candle inside a hollowed turnip, a jack-o’-lantern.

The living donned costumes made of animal heads and skins and blackened their faces to confuse the returning dead. Children were given treats against the chance a goblin was hiding among them. Since the head contained the spirit, the Celts carved fearsome human faces on hollowed-out turnips.

When the Irish, Scots and Welsh sailed to America, they brought Halloween with them and discovered pumpkins. It was tough carving turnips. Pumpkins were much easier to turn into faces calculated to turn aside a body-seeking spirit. Stingy Jack had an improved lantern to guide him through his eternal night.

The Roman Catholic Church co-opted the most fearful night on the Celtic calendar in the seventh century. Pope Boniface IV decreed Nov. 1 would be All Saints Day, or All Hallows’ Day. The night before was All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, a time when Celts extinguished fires in their homes and lit bonfires outside, all the better to keep ghosts and goblins away from their hearths.

Ancient Hawaiians had their own stories of spirits walking through the blackness of po, any and all nights. When the stars and moon ruled the sky, the veil between this world and the supernatural parted. The akua hele loa looked not for living bodies to inhabit, but to enjoy earthly pleasures.

There was no fear, but it was good to be careful. It was said that if luau was cooked after dark, it might be eaten or defiled by the lapu o ka po. Nathaniel B. Emerson, the translator of David Malo’s “Hawaiian Antiquities,” noted “it was the custom to wave a lighted candle” to keep the foul spirits away from the food.

Even today, there are those who can hear the spirits of marching warriors. If you hear the rustle of capes and the rattle of spears in the night, be careful to avert your eyes. Listen hard enough and you might hear stones tell tales of giant lizards and events lost in the mists of time.

There was no need to light big fires or lanterns. A kukui oil lamp shed enough light. Time passes at its own pace. Today, it takes sharp ears and an open soul to hear the lessons taught by the old ones. The soft footfalls of sandaled feet are masked by the sound of machines and the electronic voices of the not-there.

No one knows when Halloween came to the green islands in the Pacific. The Maui News mentioned a 1901 celebration, if the night of the dreaded dead can be celebrated. Scots observed Samhain for hundreds of years on craggy peaks and in steep-walled valleys not unlike those found on Maui. Perhaps one of the Scots brought to Maui to build stone churches had Halloween in his luggage.

Today, there is no fear of Halloween. It is the most silly holiday, a time when individuals delight in adopting another personality and gleefully festoon homes, stores and offices with fake spider webs, cut-out witches, fake skulls and fat, orange pumpkins carved in pale imitation of those long-ago turnips. The practice of giving children treats has survived.

The creatively weird will gather on Halloween in Lahaina. They’ll crowd the narrow sidewalks of the town rich in Hawaiian and missionary and whaling history. Maui police will be scattered down Front Street, looking for the drunks, the lewdly undressed and those who have adopted pugnacious personalities.

On a cool, green island with magical stones, ancient Celts faced another world once a night each year. On our green, warm islands with magical stones, we can do the same any night. Just believe.

* Ron Youngblood is a retired editor and staff writer for The Maui News. His email address is ryoungblood@hawaii.rr.com.

Maui Nei

It takes very little traveling in Kula to see all sorts of country.

Up the road apiece, there’s continuous activity in the fields farmed by the Watanabe family. Daybreak to dark, fair weather or foul, there’s always someone planting, irrigating or harvesting. Some of the far fields are draped over a steep ridge. Others are close enough to the road for cars and trucks to be misted by windblown spray from sprinklers.

Most of the fields are devoted to cabbage. When it’s time to harvest, crews of largely older Mauians work their way down the rows, picking and pruning the outer leaves from the heads. The tonsorial process ends with the cabbages dumped into string bags hung from metal stands scattered around the field.

Later, the bags go on pallets picked up by a tractor-mounted forklift to be delivered to a farm truck for the first stage of the journey to market. At the end of the day, the mostly female harvesters sit alongside the road to be picked up for the trip home in a utility van. It takes more than a few tractors and trucks to keep a farm going.

One field is devoted to green onions. It’s a small field littered with rocks. A common joke is the only thing that grows easily below Kula Highway is pohaku. Lights burn into the night when it’s time to pull up the onions. A relatively new shed is devoted to cleaning and packing the harvest.

There are vegetables and there are goats. More than a few pockets of property are home for clusters of Capra aegragus hircus. The herbivores do an excellent job of consuming weeds and keeping the pili, fountain and cane grass down if they are not raised for meat or milk. On some days, a solitary goat will stand on a 4-foot-high outcropping of boulders shaded by kiawe trees overlooking the road. The king of the hill stares off in the distance, responding to DNA once necessary when predators were around. In one pasture, goats are joined by two miniature horses about half the size of normal steeds.

More than one of several pastures and paddocks along a single mile of the side road is populated by horses. During the last few post-storm days, pairs of horses stand side by side, nose to tail. During these breathless days, it’s helpful to have a buddy using its tail to shoo away flies and mosquitoes.

For several months, one sizable pasture was home for a single horse, a good-looking mare regularly fed oats hung from a fence in blue plastic buckets. She often looked up in apparent anticipation when a pickup truck went by on the 20-mph road.

Then came the morning the mare created a smile-producing sight. At her side was a foal. The keiki couldn’t have been in this world more than a few hours. It was unsteady on its long, thin legs, but had no problem reaching mom’s teats. Between feedings, the foal would lie in the grass with mom keeping watch. She’d move between any perceived threat and her offspring. The cautionary behavior was related to Toni Thompson, a friend who raises horses.

“We have a mare who is as gentle as can be but when she has a foal, watch out. She’s been known to chase people who get too close, even me. It’s funny to see people running from her.” Even equine know-nothings are aware horses can inflict painful bites, not to mention the damage their hooves can do.

There’s an atavistic pleasure in seeing newborn animals. In a seldom-used pasture along Kula Highway, there had been two white-faced cows munching away. One day, there were three. The newcomer was a calf, still wet from birth. With a string of placenta hanging from her backside, mom was busy using her tongue to clean up her offspring.

For the past several nights, cattle have made their presence known by mournful bellowing. The sound reverberates a couple times a year when calves become wean-outs and are separated from their mothers.

One nighttime sound has been missing of late – the barking of axis deer. Apparently, the rains have produced enough grass to keep the small packs of the Bambi look-alikes grazing elsewhere.

New, largely expensive houses built by newcomers looking for space and magnificent views are slowly spreading across lower Kula. The new neighbors are a far cry from ranchers and farmers. Shirley Jacintho, a Maui girl who lives one house above home, looked at the houses strung out along the road that once ran through pastures.

“This place is beginning to look like town.” she said.

Maybe so, but there is still a lot of country in this part of Upcountry.

* Ron Youngblood is a retired editor and staff writer for The Maui News. His email address is ryoungblood@hawaii.rr.com.

Maui Nei

The winner of a national award for innovative and successful fundraising missed its goal – the first time in 15 years. Hawaii Public Radio’s experience illustrates a growing problem for donation-supported agencies nationwide and on Maui.

With two program streams slowly expanded to include stations on Oahu, Maui, the Big Island and Kauai, HPR relies on two intensive fund drives every six months. Maui listeners tune in to KKUA (90.7 FM) and KMPI (89.7 FM). The same frequencies yield KMPH in Hana and a couple of translator stations installed to get around signal-blocking geography.

Last week, Hawaii Public Radio conducted its second fund drive of the year, called Celebration 2014. The 10-day fund drive ended Saturday $130,431 short of the $1.03 million needed for the next six months. Much hair-pulling during the weekend resulted in a truncated fund drive beginning Wednesday and scheduled to run two or three days. Maybe less.

With telephones ringing in the background, the on-air crew began the added drive sounding hopeful. Many of this week’s subscribers mentioned they meant to contribute last week, but just didn’t get around to it.

Nationally, with the exception of that Internet-hyped ice bucket challenge, charitable organizations are suffering through a time of dropping contributions and rising costs. A recent national survey indicated that middle-income households are contributing more while the upper third of income earners are contributing less. That could be the situation on Maui.

Maui’s charitable organizations are supported largely by wage-earners. There is less support from high-buck, part-time residents and probably all those folks who fill the island’s time-share apartments two weeks or so a year.

The Maui United Way – not to be confused with Molokai’s Friendly Isle United Way and Oahu’s Aloha United Way – struggles to raise the cash needed to support 40 organizations supplying social, health and welfare services on Maui and Lanai. The United Way was set up decades ago to consolidate fundraising by individual groups. It is one of only a few charitable organizations that allow individual employees to contribute straight out of their paychecks.

Actually, Hawaii Public Radio is not a charity. It is a subscription-supported public service. Contributions are tax deductible. According to regular surveys, the same ones used by commercial broadcast stations, something like 10 percent of regular listeners actually support the operation, which has no commercials, although it does have mentions of corporate donors.

Maui listeners also have a homegrown subscription radio station, Mana’o (91.5 FM). This volunteer-operated station relies on business support, individual contributions and fundraisers such as its first Sunday of the month concerts at Casanova in Makawao.

Mana’o recently increased its on-air coverage with a higher-powered transmitter. Both Mana’o and Hawaii Public Radio can be heard live on the Internet and are regularly listened to around the world. Some of those far-flung listeners actually contribute to the operations for a taste of the islands they have come to love.

Hawaii Public Radio’s HPR1 specializes in classical music, National Public Radio newscasts and individual shows such as “The Prairie Home Companion.” HPR2 carries talk shows (both local and national), the BBC and Hawaiian, jazz and other music. National programs must be purchased, based on the number of listeners, not the number of contributors.

The two program streams include local news covering the entire state. Hawaii Public Radio has the largest news operation of any in the state, including commercial stations.

Mana’o’s programming is usually described as being eclectic. That translates to you never know what you are going to hear. The volunteer disc jockeys are given free rein to play whatever whenever. The station’s main function is off-the-wall entertainment while promoting live music and local events.

There are other nonprofit radio stations serving Maui but they are supported by churches, youth groups and Akaku: Maui Community Television. Most are low-power with frequencies clustered around 88 and 89 FM.

Once upon a time, there was little choice in what you could hear on the radio. Once upon a time, most social services were supported by the plantations and tax-funded grants. Today, it’s up to individuals. Have you given your share?

* Ron Youngblood is a retired editor and staff writer for The Maui News. His email address is ryoungblood@hawaii.rr.com.

Maui Nei

In 1968, a Mainland reporter hired by the Honolulu Advertiser was intrigued by the sound of a distinctly local way of talking. Worth learning, he thought. He sought out an island-born colleague, Jerry Burris.

“I’d like to learn pidgin,” the newcomer said.

Burris replied, “Which one?” He went on to explain that each ethnic group in the islands spoke its own sort of pidgin, often shaped by geographic location or avocation such as surfing.

That was that.

The malihini decided to stick with the only language he knew – English, buttressed by a smattering of Latin, Italian and German imperfectly learned in school and the French words found in English-language dictionaries. Maui taught him a valuable lesson. No one expected a haole to speak anything but English but were sensitive to clumsy attempts to speak pidgin.

While working as a reporter, he shared an office with another haole newcomer who was working as an insurance agent. He was enrolling so few clients, the newcomer was frustrated.

“I don’t understand it. I’m a good salesman with a good product,” he moaned. “I do all right with haoles but can’t connect with locals.” He readily accepted a suggestion to demonstrate the sales pitch he aimed at locals.

Wow! His approach was a disaster. Even to haole ears with only five years of listening to island patois, his “pidgin” was more than clumsy. It sounded patronizing, a kind of baby talk.

“Stick to American,” he was advised.

“Yeah, I suppose I should. There are times when I have difficulty even understanding what they’re saying.”

The reporter knew exactly what he meant. When dealing with someone speaking pidgin with a strong accent, there were times when he would have to ask several times what the speaker meant. Everyone was helpful when he’d say, “I’m sorry, but got haole ears.”

One of the most vicious newspaper stories ever written was done by a snippy woman who had “learned” her trade at a San Francisco alternative weekly edited by a jerk who delighted in generating lawsuits. She interviewed a new Maui council member, recorded his answers and then quoted him phonetically.

The man was well educated and very much qualified to serve on the council, but was most comfortable speaking pidgin. Pidgin is verbal and seldom can be turned authentically into print. For many newcomers, pidgin sounds and looks uneducated, if not dumb. Wrong.

The various forms of pidgin were necessary for English-speaking bosses to communicate with employees who spoke Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Portuguese, etc. The pidgin that developed used a mix of English and the speaker’s first language. In more recent times, pidgin can be used as an identifier.

In the 1970s, a good-looking haole woman talked about being hassled by local guys treating her as if she were a tourist. “I usually straighten them out by laying a bunch of pidgin on ’em,” she said. “That’s more effective than saying I was born on Oahu.”

Pidgin is an integral part of island culture, and it isn’t so much learned as absorbed. Enough years spent listening can give an English speaker at least the lilt of island language.

These days, you don’t hear pidgin much. Blame ubiquitous exposure to Mainland TV, movies and ghetto-based, so-called music. And schools. Despite territorial efforts to stamp out everything but English, pidgin survived well into the second half of the 20th century. There were even schools where local teachers communicated with their students in pidgin. Notable exceptions were the tax-supported English Standard schools that required students to exhibit fluent English before they were accepted. And woe be to the student who used pidgin – or Hawaiian – in the classroom. Ask anyone who was a Standard English student during the 1930s and ’40s.

While common use of pidgin seems to be disappearing, there is an increase in the use of Hawaiian due to immersion schools modeled on successful efforts by the Maori in New Zealand. The schools are conducted entirely in Hawaiian and parents of the students are required to learn the language so it can be used at home.

If a culture is to survive, its language must be preserved. Pidgin, along with Hawaiian, is an integral part of island culture. There’s no greater compliment for a Mainland-born individual than being told, “You sound like a kamaaina haole.”

* Ron Youngblood is a retired editor and staff writer for The Maui News. His email address is ryoungblood@hawaii.rr.com.

Maui Nei

Judging from the stories and editorials in The Maui News, civic pride had a lot to do with establishing a tradition stretching from 1916 to 2014. The tradition has resulted in the Maui Fair, the largest party on the island.

With a population for less than 38,000, civic leaders raised some $5,000, set out to better an earlier fair on the Big Island of Hawaii and promoted the event on Oahu. The promotion resulted in Matson scheduling extra interisland voyages by the steamships Mauna Kea and Claudine, in addition to its regularly scheduled runs, including the one that brought over the star of the first Maui County Fair – Daisy, the elephant.

The pachyderm apparently belonged to the City and County of Honolulu. The Maui County Board of Supervisors voted to indemnify Daisy to the tune of $3,000, just in case something happened to her. She arrived several days before the opening of the fair during the first weekend of December 1916. The paper noted she would need time to rest up. Kids were given the chance to ride her.

The plantations declared one-day holidays to give their workers a chance to visit the fair, set up on the “Wailuku Baseball Field,” apparently located somewhere on the Waikapu side of Wailuku since it was “bordered by a highway . . . and sugar cane fields.” The early reception to the fair was so large, Oahu had to be canvassed to acquire additional tents.

The Grand Hotel in Wailuku was in the final stages of being built and furnished. The Maui Hotel had been recently enlarged and renovated. “While these inns are Maui’s best, there are other hostelries besides,” said one of several stories printed in the Nov. 24, 1916, edition.

The story said “Wailuku can take care of 250 visitors without asking anyone to sleep in the bathtubs or on the billiard, as many more in private homes.” The story ended with “Maui is opulent and can afford to give all visitors a good time.”

“All of this, my friends, shows community spirit of which you and I might well be proud.” Journalism in those days was more effusive than it is today.

A long story written by the editor of the Star-Bulletin touted “pleasant surprises” for visitors who wanted to see more than the fair. He wrote, “the scenery is magnificent, the climate fine.” He also noted “there are several translations of Maui No Ka Oi.” His favorite was “Maui shall stand first.”

And, it did.

An editorial on the last day of the fair said, “No committee on Earth could ever have succeeded in this venture had it not have been for the cooperation given by the citizens of Maui (and the citizens throughout the territory).”

“The first Maui County Fair was a success . . . from every viewpoint. It was a revelation even to ourselves. . . . Also we are assured we ‘beat’ the Hilo fair. . . . It is great. It is stimulating. It would not have been possible five years ago and is pregnant with meaning and promise for the future. It is the real Maui spirit – the kind of spirit that accomplishes the impossible.”

This issue of the paper included seven columns of type listing winners in every sort of category, ranging from sewing to the size of sugar cane, from carpentry to furniture making, from Hawaiian to homemaker arts.

Then, as now, it noted substantial funds being raised for various organizations. The fair, which has been held annually except years during World War I and World War II, is a major fundraiser for Maui’s nonprofit organizations, which makes the Food Court a major draw. Visitors are given 44 chances to broke da mouth on island and ethnic favorites.

(A nonfair note: While going through the 1916 newspapers, an ad caught my eye. E.O. Hall & Sons of Honolulu offered six 1915 Indian motorcycles for prices ranging from $245 to $325 depending on model and whether the bike had electric head- and taillights. E kala mai, just couldn’t resist the temptation.)

Of course, the fair begins tonight with a parade of thousands between UH-Maui College and the fairgrounds at the Wailuku Memorial Complex. The parade is one of those traditions first set in 1916 when some 3,000 youngsters marched from somewhere to the Wailuku Baseball Field.

“Maui Nei” is also something of a fair tradition. The fair opens on a Thursday, the same day the column has been printed for 26 years. Each of the previous columns ended the same way: “See you at the fair.”

This year: Mahalo nui loa to all the volunteers who make the fair possible.

* Ron Youngblood is a retired editor and staff writer for The Maui News.

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