Termite TV - Life Stories

My name is Ted R., and I’m from California. This place called Salenas, that’s where I kind of grew up. And when I was seven, you know, I was an average kind of kid growing up. When I turned seventeen, I joined the service, and I ended up on nuclear submarines. I went to schools all over in the United States - ______, San Diego, California - and I ended up in Hawaii, and then I was on the submarine; nuclear ballistic missile submarine called the Ethan Allen. And I ended up becoming a radiomen, so I set out a teletype on this nuclear submarine waiting for world war three. And so that’s what I did for four years. Out of that four years, I spent one year living underwater in this godforsaken machine. So, to make a long story short, when I got out of that submarine finally after all these years, I kind of, like, didn’t want nothing to do with the society anymore because I viewed things as nuclear targets, and so therefore I kind of had to get away. I didn’t want to have jobs and get, you know, in with the, into buildings and things like that, because it was, like, not good. Any rate, when I got out of the service, we had, I became a chicken fighter, and I was a chicken fighter for one year. And I fought chickens with this old man chicken fighter in Oahu. His name was Boy Cericle, and he was one of the greatest Oahu chicken fighters and so. We fought chickens until God knows what, we fought, and you know we partied, we made barbecues. I learned how to barbecue and do things like that, and cook food and be more of like a family kind of guy. And that’s when I eventually moved on to the big island after that one year of fighting chickens. I moved to the big island here with a girl I’d met from over there, and her name was Donna, Donna Ambrose. And then we, we moved to Volcano up here, actually. Our first house in Namakani Paio, which is right down the road. We lived in a tent for months, and then we moved into the jungle down here off of Lee Connie Road down in the subdivision down there. I built a treehouse, and we lived in there for must have been about a year, real close to a year, and she got pregnant. She was like seven, eight months pregnant, and we were living in the trees, and we had no water. You know, we had water, but we used rain water into a fifty-five gallon barrel kind of thing, and you know, our showers were live five-gallon buckets. We dumped five gallon buckets of water over us, and that’s how we took showers, and we’d hitchhike all the way down Hilo and go to the river and take baths in the river, ‘cause we had no vehicle or cars and things like that. Eventually I made a little bit of money, and I bought a piece of property down at Greensand subdivision in Kau, all the way down towards south point. We had the baby eventually up here, and I started building a little house on the property we got, and then we had two more boys that were born in the house. We didn’t go to the hospital or nothing. Of course, our first kid, Aaron, we were going to have in a treehouse, but that kind of was getting a little bit scary, but, so yeah, we ended up having it down in Hilo at the hospital, because, you know, the midwives weren’t that great and things like that, didn’t know when to push. At any rate, the next two kids down in the house I built were born right in the house. They didn’t go to hospitals or whatnot. So I’ve been hiking around these jungles and these mountains for twenty years, and I’m getting a little tired now. You know, I’ve put in my twenty years of mountain hiking. Now I’m kind of like a prospector. I get, find crystals in caves. I’ve been finding a lot of interesting crystals these days. They’re kind of nice, and right now I’m kind of, I’m becoming an inventor. I’ve invented new water tech toys that I’ve invented that I believe’s going to take off. Some new pliers, and things like that. I’m working on hurricane strappings for houses. I’m getting ready to build an indestructible house for people that’s real simple and easy to build, and it’s going to be hurricane proof, earthquake proof, I’m also thinking it’s going to be tornado proof and flood proof. And so this is the new direction I’m building in now. I’m also building and designing a new flexible house. Now I’m hoping to start whole new industries on the big island. That’s what I’m here for. And so, that’s in a nutshell, that’s my story.