Still plenty of life and joy left in this isle centenarian

Coming of age in the Great Depression, Joseph Lee took whatever work he could find for whatever compensation he could wrangle.

At 16, too scrawny to compete with full-grown men for daywork at Dole Pineapple, Lee found employment with the smaller Hawaiian Pineapple Co. As a “dumper,” he worked with a partner to dump crates of pineapple onto a conveyor to be peeled and sliced.

Lee’s first partner told him it was the job of the person on the right to then toss the empty box into a large bin above. Lee dutifully chucked the boxes all morning before learning that his partner had pulled one over on him.

“We were supposed to take turns,” he said, shaking his head. “I was worn out!”

Still, Lee earned 20 cents for that first day’s labor, enough for him to stop in and buy a 5-cent loaf of bread on the way home.

“I felt like the biggest guy to be able to bring home food for my mother.”

After graduating from Saint Louis School, Lee went to work with his father, a butcher at CQ Yee Hop & Co.

“But because I was left-handed, I couldn’t cut the meat the same as my father — the curve of the meat was different,” Lee said. “So he gave me a big round steak with no bone and told me to cut it into chop suey meat. It was hard! I was in the back cutting all morning.”

The job didn’t pay, but it did feed — up to three meals a day for full-time workers. In time Lee moved to a paid position as a grocery clerk and later, on the strength of good penmanship honed at Saint Louis, a job writing purchase orders.

By the time Lee married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy, in 1941, he had completed night school and was working as a bookkeeper at Aloha Motors. He started a new job at Hawaiian Telephone Co. just a week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Lee and his new wife, who worked at the Board of Water Supply, went to work with gas masks strapped to their waists.

Lee, whom supervisors sometimes recruited for midday bowling breaks, would remain with Hawaiian Telephone for more than 30 years. He and Dot raised two children — Lanette and Leighton — in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home in Kahala Heights designed by Dot’s brother-in-law, Frederic Liang.

In retirement the Lees traveled from Asia to Australia to Europe, and visited Lanette and her family in Wisconsin and Leighton and his family in California.

“It made me the most happy to visit the kids,” Lee said.

Leighton died in 2005, Dot in 2009. But with five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren who adore their “Gungy,” there is still much joy to be had.

At the dawn of his second century on Earth, Lee remains strong, positive, loving. A rascal, his family insists.

The same, then, as always.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.