It was 1974, Wannette Gomes recalls, and she, an impetuous 19-year-old from Aliamanu, was at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Ala., for basic training.
On weekends she and a group of friends would take the bus to a couple of the nearby shopping centers.
In an area historically defined by black and white, they were a conspicuously diverse group of young women: two African-American, one white, one Mexican, one half-Japanese and one Hawaiian-Portuguese (Gomes).
One weekend, the young ladies boarded the bus and were informed by the driver that — Rosa Parks notwithstanding — the darker skinned among them would need to sit in the back.
"Coming from Hawaii, I had never experienced anything like that," Gomes says.
Gomes refused and gave the driver a polite but forceful lesson on civil rights. And when the driver threatened to call police, Gomes and her friends told him to go right ahead.
"So the police came down," Gomes says, "and when they saw our uniforms, they told the driver that he had to let us sit where we wanted. He was fuming."
In fact, the driver was still hot hours later when the women boarded the same bus for the ride back to base.
As it happened, the circuit from base to shopping centers and back was the driver’s regular route. Whenever the women wanted to go out on their weekend leave, he was their driver coming and going.
"So one day we got on, and I stopped and introduced myself and my friends and told him where we were all from," Gomes said. "He was surprised. He wanted to know why I did that, and I told him it was so he would know who were are."
The weekend rides continued with no noticeable thaw in relations. Then one evening, the girls lingered too long at the mall and were forced to run to the bus stop.
"It was the last bus of the night, and if we missed it we’d get in trouble," Gomes said.
The women made it to the stop a few minutes late but found the bus still there. The driver had waited for them.
As basic training wound to a close, one of Gomes’ friends gave the driver an invitation to their graduation ceremony.
"A lot of our families couldn’t afford to come down, so we didn’t expect to see anyone we knew at the graduation," Gomes said. "But, the driver showed up with his wife."
Gomes was on leave in Hawaii a couple of weeks later when she received word that the driver had died. Gomes cut her stay short and joined her friends at the man’s funeral.
"When we got there, a man walked up to us and said that we didn’t belong there and that we should go," Gomes recalls. "But then someone saw what was happening and told the driver’s wife. She came out and talked to the guy, who turned out to be her son.
"It’s OK," she told him. "These are your father’s friends."
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Check out @IncidentalLives on Twitter. Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.
