Termite TV - Life Stories

The way we started the center is when I retired from, well, I was a school cafeteria manager on this island. When Pearl Harbor struck, I was immediately sent to the big city to organize an emergency feeding station, and they gave me another school there, and i had a room full of surplus food, ice box for medicine, and I had to get a doctor and ambulance and organize all that for emergency feeding place. Then I met my husband; he worked in Pearl Harbor, and he had to dive under the benches when the attacks came the first few days. But they didn’t come back, I didn’t need to feed any emergency. But anyway, I met my husband and I stayed there in school for another year or so, and when there was an opportunity for someone to buy land here for homesteading, my brother asked me to go and listen for his name for the drawing, and they said, ‘Oh, put your name in so you could help your brother out!’, you know, to get this thirty-acre farm subdivision on this island. I said, ‘I came from a farm. I’ll be darned if I’ll be going back to a farm again!’, but they said no, you may be able to help your brother in the drawing to see if he can get a suitable place. So at ten o’clock when they asked me to take my application to the post office at nine o’clock and ask the postman to put it in their box, in the land office box to get the drawing at nine o’clock. So they did. The first name that was drawn, no show. The second name that was drawn was mine, and I knew the land commissioner because when I was stationed in Honolulu, I stayed with her. She needed a cook, and I had a cafeteria, of course, and I cooked for her. And she held up my hand, and the cameras start flashing, and I was so surprised because they wanted an article in the newspaper that day. So that’s how I got my thirty acres of land here, and my husband, city boy, wanted to be in the country, and we mulled about it for a few months and then he still wanted to come. So, we were only required to build a house on this land and put a fence on our boundary. So, I moved here, and I went to a special education to cater to tourists because I knew there was a hotel here, The Volcano House. And so I studied, you know, tourism, and when I moved here, in less than six months I was called to go and hostess at the hotel at Volcano House; and I enjoyed, I love people. I enjoyed that very much. Green people we’d serve a thousand lunches everyday during the rush hour, getting the people out, and those days we served everything from the main dish, soup, salad. Everything was brought to the table, you know, and up ‘til dessert, and it was a mad rush. And I worked for this, the owner of Volcano House at that time was a Greek, Uncle George. Like ____, he lived to be one-hundred and two, and he would sit in the corner and say, ‘How many today, Laura?’ and I’d say, ‘Two many, Uncle George, I’m going crazy!