Feisty advocate is devoted to rallying for the underdog

The police warned her not to cross the line, a warning that anyone who knows Lela Hubbard would recognize as a gold-embossed invitation to do just the opposite.

“As soon as we crossed that line,” Hubbard recalled with clear amusement, “all these men in riot gear jumped out at us. I was arrested for the first time at age 51!”

Hubbard has no regrets about the 1989 incident. She and hundreds of others were taking a stand against a geothermal project that involved drilling within the Wao Kele o Puna Natural Area Forest Preserve on Hawaii island.

Still feisty at age 75, Hubbard has a long and colorful history of speaking her mind and standing up for what she believes in.

“I speak bluntly, and I step on a lot of toes,” Hubbard said. “I got that from my dad. He’s the one who told us to help people whenever we can.”

Hubbard recalls the time she accompanied her father, Lewis, to a tenement building downtown. Her father was a supervisor at a cement company at the time, and one of his workers had been absent from work for a few days. Her father knew the man had a drinking problem, but didn’t want to fire him because he had a wife and two kids to support.

“So we went to his apartment, and it smelled like old oil and fish,” Hubbard said. “I saw a baby walking around with no diaper, and there were holes in the linoleum.

“The experience stayed with me because I knew I never wanted to live like that,” Hubbard said. “I saw what it was like to be poor, and it made me sympathetic to the underdog.”

Hubbard grew up in Kalihi and graduated from St. Andrew’s Priory. She attended the University of Hawaii and later San Diego State University, where she earned a degree in secondary education.

While in San Diego, Hubbard worked in a bookmobile, providing mobile library services to poor neighborhoods.

BACK in Hawaii in the 1970s, Hubbard served as a librarian in the high-security area of the Halawa Correctional Facility, checking out books to prisoners from a locked cell.

Stymied in her attempt to persuade prison officials to let her start a literacy program, Hubbard took matters into her own hands by starting a prison newspaper with phonics lessons that literate prisoners could use to help their cellmates learn to read.

“It was an eye-opening experience, just seeing the harshness and brutality of that life, but I never had any problems there because I respected all the prisoners and treated everybody with respect,” she said.

Over the years, Hubbard has devoted her considerable energies to the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, environmental causes, services for seniors and the disabled, and scores of other concerns. Along the way, she’s used her straight-talking ways to prick the consciences of senators and CEOs, bureaucrats and back-room dealers.

“I feel there needs to be more compassion in government,” she says. “We need to show that aloha isn’t just some word that you mouth in front of the cameras.”