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RETURN TO THE HAWAIIAN ISLES Clintonians Find Changes (EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. and Mrs. David Mixon recently visited in Hawaii where they lived 22 years ago. This is an account of their trip and their reactions to the changes in the islands. Dr. Mixon is an optometrist in Clinton.) BY DR. DAVID MIXON My family and I recently re turned from a visit to the Hawai ian Islands where my wife and I lived in 1947 and 1948. Our daughter was born in Honolulu in 1948 and we ,had planned Jo take her for a visit to her birth place when she finished high school, but due to pressure of business was unable to do so. This year I was named a dele gate to the National Optometric Convention being held in Honolulu, so we decided to take our vacation just prior to the convention and visit some ofthe other Hawaiian Islands. My wife, my son and myself left Greenville-Spartanburg airport at 8:15 a.m. and arrived in Sacrimento, California the afternoon of the same day where we spent a few days with our son-in-law and daughter, Lt. and Mrs. Jerry Holland. Oui daughter finally decided to go with us to the islands, so the four of us boarded a plane in Sacrimento and left for the islands. We flew for five hours and fifteen minutes, then landed at Hilo on the island of Hawaii. Hawaii is the largest island of the group. It is also the newest island of the group. All of the Hawaiian Islands were formed by volcanic eruptions and the island of Hawaii was formed last and still has active volcanoes. VOLCANO We spent the night in the city of Hilo, then toured the island the next day. We spent a couple of hours visiting the historic sights along the coast, then headed inland and up the moun tains for the volcanic areas. We had lunch on the edge of a volcano crater where the temp erature at the top of the ground was 120 degrees four feet below the surface the temperature was 160 degrees. There were many fissures in the ground and when It rained, which is quite frequent the rain would of coarse enter the fissures and would return to the surface as steam. We had liffich, saw a movie of re cent volcanic eruptions, then headed for a volcano which had been erupting two to three times a week for the past three to four months. When we arrived at the volcano site, it was cold and raining but my daughter and 1 endured the weather until the molten lava began to flow. We considered ourselves fortunate to be able to view this once in a life-time event. The eruption was not violent. There were no explosions with lava shooting into the air, but rather the molten lava overflowing the crater and flowing down hill. This area where we stood and watched the lava flow had been completely covered by an earlier eruption this year and had burned the trees off a couple of feet from the ground but still did not completely kill them be cause some of them were sprouting again from the stump. PARKER RANCH We drove beside the Parker cattle ranch which is the second largest ranch in the world being exceeded in sire only by the King ranch in Texas. We also saw movie actor James Stewart’s Black Angus ranch, after which came the Macadema nut farms and coffee plantations. We visited the Black Sand Beach which was formed many years ago by lava flowing into the ocean. Upon contact with the salt water it explodes and turns into sand, though many hundreds of years of lucking it will ivent- ually turn white. Although the sand is quite black it doesn’t dirty the feet any more than white sand. The next day I played golf on a course that had been built in an area which was completely cov ered by lava from a volcanic eruption. Most of the lava had been removed, crushed, and used in building roads. However, the ground was still quite hard beneath a thin layer of top soil which had been hauled in. To compensate for this, the fair ways were watered and a type of grass used which gave a carpet about two inches deep. This meant that you had to allow for the deep grass so as not to hit under the ball, it also meant that you got no more than a few feet of roll on your drive. These things coupled with very high humidity, which prevented the ball from traveling a long dis tance in the air, made the course a challenging one for me, a duf fer, a very frustrating one. How ever, better golfing was to come later on one of the other islands. We left the Island of Hawaii and 19 minutes later landed on the island of Kaui. We had a swim in the ocean, then bathed, dressed and watched the hula dancers while having dinner at our hotel. We saw hundreds of acres of sugar cane and stopped at one place where they we re gathering it. When the cane is mature, which takes about eighteen months, the fields are set on fire to burn the blades from the stalks then the stalks are cut and loaded onto trucks by steam shovels. The trucks dump them into the irrigation ditches which floats them to the mill and washes them as they float along. We were told that the sugar cane workers are among the highest paid laborers on the is land, the average laborer making thirty dollars a day. Next we visited a most inter esting place along the coast called The Blowing Horn hole. It is so called because waves from the "cean have formed a large cave, at water level, in the rock and finally forced a hole straight up through the rock about fifty feet in all. When the large waves come in from the ocean they fill the cave , trap the air inside,-—f finally the air and water escape through the vertical hole. The escaping air makes a noise like a ship’s fog horn and the water escaping through the vertical hole causes a gyser many feet straight up. FERN GROTTO We took a ferry boat ride up a river to a cave called the Fern Grotto where ferns grow from the roof of the caves. Dur ing the journey up the river, we were entertained by native music and song and were shown the area were scenes in the T. V. series, Gilligan’s Island were filmed. The background for several other movies were also filmed here. In one of the small towns on this island, the towns folk have planted beautiful flow ers on the side of a rocky slope about a hundred and fifty feet high as a community project. These flowers bloom the year round and are bright reds, orange, lavender, etc. They re minded meofClintonintheearly spring when the azaleas are blooming. Thus, this craggy slope which would have been an eye sore were it not for the flowers, was one of the prettiest places we saw. We left the island of Kauii and in 18 minutes landed on the island of Maui to disembark and take on passengers before pro ceeding on to Honolulu. Time did not permit us to tour the island of Maui which I am told is one of the prettiest and most inter esting. In 25 minutes, we land ed at the Honolulu International Airport which is now the comb ination of the army’s Hickham Field and the old Honolulu Municipal Airport. We were told that it is one of the busiest air ports in the world with a plane landing or taking off every two minutes. We were able to view Diamond Head, Waikii Beach, Honolulu and Pearl Habor and it was at this time that I realized t DR. MIXON that it was not the same place we had lived 22 years ago. The largest building on the island at that time was the Royal Hawai ian Hotel, but I was not able to locate it from the air due to miles of skyscrapers from twenty to forty stores high. A representative from our travel agency met us at the airport and took us to our hotel, the Hilton Hawaiian, which covered twenty acres of land and normally has a larger population than the city of Clinton. Business sessions and seminars were held early in the morning and ended about one o’clock in the afternoon which gave the greater part of the afternoon for recreation and sight seeing which we took ad vantage of. My son, David, has always been a surfing enthusi ast and he was delighted to be able to surf at Waikiki Beach. SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY One afternoon we rented a car and went back to the street where we lived when our oldest child was born. When we lived there twenty-two years ago, it was a quiet residential section near the edge of the city. Now one of the freeways is only two blocks away, many of the homes have been torn down and re placed by huge apartment build ings and hotels and the largest shopping center in the world under one roof is located near by. We visited the hospital where our daughter was born and again saw the dramatic change. The hospital is now about four times as large as it was when our daughter was born and directly across the street from the hospital where there were sev eral acres of vacant land there are now several large hotels. W'e took the outer freeway and after driving for about fifteen , miles, passed what used to be a beautiful lake of more than one hundred acreb surrounded by mountains except on the ocean side where you could rent a boat and fish all day for a dol lar. Alas, the lake is no more, | it has been drained and filled and there is now a housing de velopment being constructed where the lake was. We drove for about five more miles and the freeway ended and here for a few miles only things were nearly as they used to be. There were beaches and hills with vantage parking areas without any homes or other buildings in view. Near the top of the mountain we took another road to a scenic place call the The Pali. It is said that an average of forty thou sand tourists visit here each day. From this mountain van tage point, one can see the blue Pacific Ocean, the flat land near the ocean, the foothills and the mountains all at the same time in a sub-tropical climate, al though it is usually quite cool here on the Pali and the wind is usually strong with clouds only a few feet above your head which of course obscures the higher mountain peaks. The wind comes in from the ocean directly into the bottom of the precipice and having no other place to go shoots straight up. When I was in the islands years ago, I used to bring an orange or potato crate up to the Pali with me, pitch it over the side, and in about a minute, on a windy day, it would be forced back up and past me. One day we took a boat tour of Pearl Harbor and Ford Is land, located in the middle of the harbor, which were de vastated by the sneak Japanese attack on the morning of Decem ber 7,1941. Many thousand men of our navy and other armed forces lost their lives on this infamous morning. Many ships were sunk and the skeletons of two of the sunken battleships are still visible. Many members of the crew of these ships were entombed in the ships when they sank. Over one thousand memb ers of the crew of the battleship Arizona are entombed in this ship alone and for this reason and to pay homage to all who were lost as a result of this attack, the ship has never been de-comissioned and a monument has been built above it where a color guard raises and lowers the Stars and Stripes each day. Ironically, a Japanese ship was undergoing repair in Pearl Har bor. We were reminded by our tour guide that Japan is now one of our strongest allies. I was privileged to play golf a couple of times on the first golf course I ever played. Yet, it wasn’t the same. Now each fairway has two greens. One green will be used for three or four days, then the other for a period of time. The greens are always in great shape when al ternated and cared for properly. A sheer, like myself, gets a little nervous coming in on hole number 17, and eighteen because less than 100 feet from these ex tend tall hotels and if you should hit high and slice yuu could easily hit someone on the 40th story balcony of a hotel. MAKAHA COURSE I write about the next golf crouse I played, The Makaha, at the risk of being called a liar, but it was so interesting I shall take the chance. The Makaha course is located about 35 miles from Waikiki beach beyong Pearl Harbor, there are two beautiful 18 hole courses here. We played the longest one. I had heard some people talking about playing golf where, when they were putting, the ball would break up-hill rather than down hill. I thought someone was try ing to pull a practical joke. I had played only a few holes when I thought the ball should break in one direction when, in fact, it seemed to break in the op posite or up-hill direction. I didn’t say anything but on the next hole it did it again and everyone started talking about it at the same time. Being an op tometrist, I started studying the landscape including the moun tains which surrounded the course, except on the ocean side, for something which would cause optical illusions but was never able to find anything that would account for the apparent illusion. It was not until I was back in Clinton and was talking with Joe McGee that I found the reason for this unusual phen omenon. Joe said he had also played on greens where the ball broke uphill and that it was due to the type of grass used. The blades and stems of this grass always grow towards a lake or body of water if there is any in the vicinity and thereby steers the ball in this direction. I ac cept this as being a logical explanation. Our stay in the islands seem ed to come to an abrupt end; we boarded a jet and in about five hours were back in San Fran cisco, after a thirty minute lay over we flew on to Sacrimento, California where our son-in-law met us at the airport. We spent a couple of days with them in sunny California where the tem peratures was 108 degrees but still not so uncomfortable be cause of the low humidity. We boarded another jet at 8:15 and arrived in Charlotte, N. C. at 4:45 where our friends, John and Mary Daniluk met us. The trip had been wonderful, but it was great to again view the familiar rolling hills of the Piedmont during the auto ride from Charlotte to Clinton. 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