Mid-Sixties Honolulu

My parents married two years before I was born and I know a bit about their story. After the wedding my parents travelled often. Here are some pictures I have of them in the Honolulu of 1965 or '66.

I wonder what it was like for them before I was born. I imagine in their lines of work, without me to chase around, and at that time in Manila, life was pretty cushy. It shows in their faces, if you know them. Here they are at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, once known as the largest shopping mall in the world.


I love the way Mom is standing in the picture above, still at Ala Moana. Like one of those sixties models. Below, I don't see a bit of the game face that Dad almost always wore around me when I was a kid, nor do I see the stiff "parade rest" that I think was always for my benefit. I also love his trim trousers, Florsheim loafers (always Florsheim. The day he stopped wearing Florsheim, I knew he was mellowing), and the French aviator sunglasses. By the way, the parking lot below later became the location for one of Mom's medical clinics in the Eighties.


I also can't ignore Dad's shirts. Not exactly cheesy, but certainly not traditional either. I imagine those are the same shirts the Mercury 7 were wearing whenever they hit the Cape back then.

Next, they are with another couple in front of the apartment they bought. Pilots used it as a crash pad well into the Eighties, and I remember going there occasionally and finding three or four of them at a time. A new flight crew would move in every few days. After my father left the airline, he kept his interest in the place until the end, although he never used it other than to see old friends. We always referred to it as "The Apartment". We still see the other couple regularly.

The other "star" in the pictures is definitely old Honolulu. The sky seems emptier, more exotic. Today, there would easily be three times as many buildings in the background if you were to stand in the same spot and snap the same image. And this Savings & Loan failed long ago.

If I can steal some from Mom's albums, I'd love to show you some pics of them in Europe. Dad looks like a secret agent and Mom looks like Jeannie Shrimpton.

What I Wore Twenty Years Ago

What I wore twenty years ago was a pair of Duck Head chinos from Britches Great Outdoors, a Brooks Brothers oxford button down shirt over a turtleneck, no socks, and L.L. Bean footwear, either leather bluchers or dirty bucks. I would hold my pants up with a braided leather belt from Jos. Banks; a belt which I still have but which is now unusable because of both condition and size. If the weather was inclement, I'd wear a Bean Baxter State Parka with a tear in the back from when Rich Matic and I went tumbling through a plate glass door in front of New South Dining Hall. This uniform would work for me for about three and a half seasons in D.C. If it was sunny -- in fact, daylight was the real prerequisite, not brightness -- I'd wear a pair of gold Ray Ban aviator sunglasses, but not the kind that Tom Cruise wore in Top Gun. They were more like the glasses Dennis Quaid wore in the "who's the best pilot you ever saw" scene in the Right Stuff, my all time favorite movie.

Ah yes, the Right Stuff, an incredible movie based on an equally incredible book by chronicler of zeitgeist Tom Wolfe. A movie that was meant to be a western with pilots instead of cowboys. Take stock of the Mercury Seven, portrayed with stylized verisimilitude by Scott Glenn (Alan Sheppard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), and Quaid (Gordo Cooper, the best pilot you ever saw). Throw playwright Sam Shepard in as fastest man alive Chuck Yeager, for good measure. These were men who had public personae thrust upon them, when in fact all most of them (save John Glenn and his twerpy sidekick, Scott Carpenter) wanted to do was to navigate the holy coordinates of the fighter jock: flying and drinking and drinking and driving and screwing. How can you do that when you're expected to be Buck Rogers?