My wife and I visited Australia and New Zealand 10 years ago. When we boarded the plane in Auckland to come home, I heard a voice call my name. It was a former student of mine from Hawaii Pacific University.
What are the odds of that happening? I expect to bump into people I know at Ala Moana Center, but not in Auckland!
I decided to ask the readers of my Rearview Mirror Insider newsletter if they had small-world stories. Here are a few of them.
Dating
Toby Kravet said, “In 1977 I took leave of my job with the Salvation Army in Iwilei for a self-directed budget tour of Europe and Israel. Near the end of the trip, I spent a night at a youth hostel in Israel just south of Haifa.
“The next morning at breakfast, the lady sitting opposite me at the table looked at my Hawaii T-shirt and asked if I was from the islands. I said yes. She said she had a half sister living in Hawaii and mentioned her name. I had been dating her half sister.”
Kravet told me another. “In the mid-1970s I hiked the 11-mile trail into Kalalau Valley on Kauai.”
He camped on a bluff near the beach, and, the next morning, started up the trail into the valley but got lost.
“I found myself in someone’s well-hidden campsite. We started talking, and it turned out that he had attended Boston University. Kravet had lived in Boston, too.
“Where were you living while in Boston?” I asked.
“Glenville Avenue,” he replied. “What number on Glenville?” I asked. “70,” he answered.
“Unbelievable,” I said. “In 1964 I was in Boston and living at 90 Glenville Ave.,” just a few doors down … 5,000 miles from Kalalau Valley!
Lived in the same house
Bob Robinson sent me his small-world entry. “My wife, Susan, and I were at dinner with the late Bud Smyser, editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and his wife. One topic of conversation was, ‘What was your hometown?’ Bud said he was from a small town in Pennsylvania.
“Susan said she was also from a small town in Pennsylvania. He said it was York. She said it was York.
“Where in York?” he asked. “On Market Street,” she responded.
“Our house was on Market Street, too,” said Bud.
“Where on Market Street?” she asked.
“On West Market Street,” he responded.
“What was the address?” she asked.
“The address was 451 W. Market St.,” Bud said.
“That was my parents’ home where I was raised,” announced Susan.
“It turned out that Dr. Harry Thomas, Susan’s father, bought the home the Smyser family lived in before Susan was born in 1935. She became a nurse, then a United Airlines stewardess, flying between L.A. and Honolulu, where we met and later married.”
That is amazing!
Gamekeeper ‘Sprock’
Part-time Maui resident Michael Lilly told me, “In 2009 my wife, Cindy, my father, Tony, and I traveled to England.
“While waiting for our transfer at the San Francisco airport, we ran into Sandy and Henry Rice, also from Maui.
“When we said we were going to England, Sandy said they and Zadoc Brown flew there every January to shoot birds. How prophetic those words turned out to be.
“We stayed with Carol and John Challis in their 12th- century Wigmore Abbey in rural Shropshire (northwest of London). John was one of the stars in the long-running hit British TV sitcom ‘Only Fools and Horses.’
“On our second morning, we took a pleasant 2-mile walk with John through hedgerows, fields and along the peaceful and meandering River Lugg.
“Suddenly, there appeared a young gamekeeper, ‘Sprock,’ on a four-wheel ATV with two dogs.
“When John said we were from Hawaii, Sprock said people came from there every January to hunt birds!
“Are they,” I asked, “Zadoc and Hillary Brown …”
“Yes, Zadoc. Who could forget that name?”
“… and Henry and Sandy Rice?”
“Yes, they come, too.”
“Zadoc, I said, is a childhood friend and my father’s stockbroker. The Rices are close friends.”
“It’s a small world, isn’t it?” he said.
Wyoming to Honokaa
Denise Teraoka said, “My mother, Joy Takeshita Teraoka, was born in Los Angeles and lived there until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when her family and 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, citizens or not, were forcibly moved to inhospitable parts of the United States.
“Her high school junior year was spent at Heart Mountain Internment Center in Wyoming. One of her teachers was Hawaii-born Tadayoshi Kawahara, who had been a graduate student at USC or UCLA at the time. He, too, found himself incarcerated.
“In 1947, after falling in love with 100th Infantry Lt. Denis Teraoka, my mom took a train across the country and a ship across the Pacific to marry him in Honokaa, on Hawaii island.
“She was flabbergasted to see none other than Tadayoshi Kawahara walking down the main street of that small town. Not knowing anyone besides my dad and his family members, she enthusiastically invited her former teacher to her wedding.
“Fast-forward 60 years. My parents moved into Kahala Nui Senior Living Community, comprised of several hundred residents. Who should be walking down her corridor? Tadayoshi Kawahara, who resided a few doors away!
“It also turns out that several of the residents knew Mr. Kawahara, having taught with him at Honokaa High and other Oahu schools.
“This should qualify as evidence of a small, small world.”
Taipei to Cairo
Mal Chan said, “I was in Cairo, Egypt, visiting one of the museums. A lady came and asked me where I came from, to which I replied, ‘Hawaii.’ She said she’s also from Hawaii, then introduced herself: Indru Watumull!
“Can you imagine my surprise? She then took me over to meet her husband, Gulab Watumull. Such a wonderful, down-to-earth couple they were, and made me feel as if we were old friends.
“It was a most memorable moment for me that I’ll never forget.”
French Riviera
Barbara Jurkens told me, “My brother-in-law’s mother and her husband were sailing a yacht up the French Riviera coast.
“One evening they arbitrarily set anchor and took the dinghy into a village for dinner. They walked into a little restaurant they came upon, and there was my brother-in-law’s best friend from grade school.”
San Francisco
Kathleen (McClellan) Miller Thomas said, “In 1952 I was with my family vacationing on the mainland.
“A few days before our trip home, my mother took me to see a live musical in San Francisco starring Mitzi Gaynor. As we were waiting to go in, I looked behind to see how long the line was and spotted my best friend, Joan, from Stevenson Intermediate. She was with her mom as well.
“After Joan and I stopped squealing, we discovered that they too had booked passage on the Lurline departing the same time as we were.”
An app for that
Given all these chance meetings, there must be even more near-misses — a friend from 5,000 miles away is across the room but you don’t see him or her, or the person left two minutes ago.
Maybe someday someone will create a smartphone app that will “talk” to other nearby smartphones and alert you when the person sitting next to you has a connection of some sort to you. I want that app.
Readers? Do you have a good small-world story?
The Rearview Mirror Insider is Bob Sigall’s now twice-weekly free email newsletter that gives readers behind-the-scenes background, stories that wouldn’t fit in the column, and lots of interesting details. Join and be an Insider at RearviewMirrorInsider.com. Mahalo!
