Rearview Mirror: Hawaii Baptist Academy celebrates its 70th anniversary

Hawaii Baptist Academy is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. It occupies three locations in Nuuanu. The high school and intermediate school are next to each other on Pali Highway at the end of Wyllie Street.

The elementary level occupies the beautiful Bates Street campus, which was once a Sacred Hearts Convent School. All three campuses are connected by tranquil Nuuanu Stream, which runs along the east side of the properties.

Baptists first came to America in the 1630s, escaping persecution from the Church of England. Today the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. with 16 million members. It split with Northern Baptists in 1845 over the issue of slavery. Southern Baptists emphasize adult, rather than infant, baptism.

Many Southern Baptist missionaries were serving in Asia in the years before World War II. When the war began, most of them were ousted and had to come back to the United States. Several of them were assigned to Hawaii to begin Baptist work, including a school in 1949, staffer Sharon Hagio told me. Hugh and Mary McCormick, who had spent 20 years in Nigeria doing missionary work, came to take the lead in establishing Hawaii Baptist Academy.

Hawaii Baptist Academy opened in surplus Army barracks, Hagio told me. They were purchased from future Mayor Frank Fasi’s salvage yard and moved to 2 acres makai of Roose­velt High School on Heulu Street in Makiki. Fasi was one of many who bought and sold surplus military equipment after the war.

Enrollment at HBA the first year was 36 seventh- and eighth graders. One of its early students was Kiyo Itokazu. I wrote about his first 10 years on Maui last month.

“After completing my eighth grade year at Kaimuki Intermediate, Mrs. Blackman approached me and encouraged me to enroll at Hawaii Baptist Academy,” Itokazu told me. “The school was approaching its second year of existence.

“ I enrolled at HBA in the ninth grade. Being financially strapped, my family could not afford the $50-per-semester tuition.

“A work scholarship of $25 was granted to reduce the financial burden. It was my daily task after school to clean the auditorium and the restrooms, located in the rear of the school in a Quonset hut.

“With a summer job at Hawaiian Pineapple Co., I was able to pay the $25 tuition and the cost of textbooks. There were no grades above us. Our class was the vanguard to establish the high school.”

By the 12th grade only three students showed up and constituted the senior class. “Thus, the first graduating class of HBA, the class of 1954, included Harry Uyeunten, Phillip Perreira Jr. and me.” Itozuka was valedictorian.

“Harry and I were neighbors on Oili Road in Kahala,” Itokazu recalls. “We went to school together, walking down to Waialae Avenue, catching the trolley, transferring at King and Punahou and then transferring again at Punahou and Wilder. The third bus led us to Liholiho Street, and we walked up a long block to the school.

“HBA is where I learned to study and learned to love to study,” Itokazu said. “The personal interest on the part of the teachers and staff enhanced my learning experience.

“Smoking, drinking, card playing, dancing, hula and playing baseball on Sundays were frowned upon. For three years I did not see a movie in the local theaters.

“In my senior year, to earn extra money for college, I worked after school at Piggly Wiggly market on 10th and Waialae avenues. En route home I would step off the bus to work as a stock boy and assist the customers by bagging groceries.”

In the late 1960s the school was bursting at the seams with over 300 students. It came up with a plan to develop the land it occupied into a condominium and use the proceeds to buy a larger site.

The 13-acre Robertson Estate, “Lanihuli,” built in 1911 at 2429 Pali Highway, was available and thought to be perfect.

The entire student body was at the Cinerama Theatre on King Street near Punahou watching the movie “The Ten Commandments” when the auction took place. Soon after Moses parted the Red Sea in the film’s most dramatic moment, the volume was turned down, and it was announced that HBA’s $553,000 was the winning bid. The theater erupted in applause and cheers of joy.

After the movie the students and faculty were shuttled in the school’s only bus to the estate, and they explored the new grounds. Just like the Israelites in the movie, they felt they were getting their first look at the promised land.

In 1973 the buildings on the original Heulu Street campus were demolished for the new condominium development. Sue Nishikawa chose the name “Mott-Smith Laniloa,” meaning “tall majesty.”

The Nuuanu campus opened in 1975.

In 1987 the Sacred Hearts Convent School on Bates Street in Nuuanu was purchased. The Franciscan nuns sold it for about $14 million, several million below its appraised value, because they liked that the property would be used for Christian elementary education. They also provided a no-interest loan for the school.

Maurine King, who taught at HBA for 52 years, told me a kindergartner recently asked her if she was old. The 79-year-old said that she was.

“Why?” he wanted to know.

“Why? Because I’ve had so many birthdays,” King told him. “It made perfect sense to him, and he told me of his five birthdays.”

King mentioned that one of HBA’s former students, Vickie Blair, introduced popcorn to Central Asia. She asked me to not be more specific for security reasons.

The woman had begun an independent ministry that grew into schools, churches and homeless shelters, and aided hospitals and orphanages.

“She wanted to take a gift to her friends when she went back on one occasion, and so she took popcorn,” King says.

“Corn is a thing that never really caught on in Central Asia except as animal food, but she showed them how to cook it and they were surprised to learn that it was so tasty.

“She went back the next year, and her host showed her their yard. She had planted some of the corn, and it was growing. Her host began to share it with other people, who shared it with still more people.

“On later trips she found it in local markets. One day she was traveling across the country and passed a field of corn. The driver said, ‘Look, popcorn. An American introduced it to us,’ and this former HBA student confessed that she was that American woman.

“The driver slammed on the brakes and stopped to introduce her to the farmer.

“That’s how Vickie Blair introduced popcorn to Central Asia.”

“Some of our students donated money so she could buy goats so the orphanage she supported could make cheese and sell it. She sent me a hilarious photo of her driving with several goats in her small car.

“We have a high percentage of graduates that go into helping professions,” King says.

Today over 1,000 students attend HBA. Annual tuition is about $16,000.

The school wants to nurture the “Eagle Spirit” that exists in every child: a spirit of learning, adventure and excellence, Billie Takaki Lueder, director of institutional advancement, told me.

Since 1949 HBA has helped thousands of children find their wings and soar into life prepared to meet whatever challenges lie ahead.

I congratulate Hawaii Baptist Academy on its 70th anniversary in the islands.

Have a question or suggestion? Contact Bob Sigall, author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books, at Sigall@Yahoo.com.