Last week I asked readers who had lived on a military base, such as Fort Ruger or Fort Kamehameha, what it was like.
Fort Kamehameha guarded the eastern side of the mouth of Pearl Harbor and has been absorbed into Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
Fort Ruger was built in 1906 as the Diamond Head Reservation. It was renamed Fort Ruger in 1909 after Civil War Gen. Thomas Ruger, who had led troops at the battles of Gettysburg, Antietam and Chancellorsville.
Kapiolani Community College took over the former Fort Ruger, which staffed the artillery batteries at Diamond Head, in the late 1980s.
Barb Miller Elm wrote that she had a “glorious childhood” at Fort Ruger.
“My family lived there from 1960 through 1966 on Palm Circle, which was a narrow, circular road surrounded by about 20 homes,” she said.
“The field in the center of Palm Circle was huge and must have been at least 200 yards in diameter. It had many uses by the Ruger kids for football, baseball, camp-outs, hootenannies, tree- climbing and other adventures for all ages.”
Large trees encircled the field, including some enormous banyans that seemed to constantly contain young human occupants, who climbed or swung on their branches, Elm recalls.
Teen Club
“The youth center had ping-pong tables, pool tables, a stage and a large basement where Leilani English taught the girls hula!” It also had a reading room, tennis courts and a basketball court.
“The youth center was the home to the Fort Ruger Teen Club. The dance room was large, and every Friday and Saturday night until 10 p.m., we teenagers bopped, jitterbugged, cha-cha’d and twisted the hours away!
“The Beatles didn’t come on the scene until 1963, so until then we were dancing to Elvis, Ricky Nelson, the Kingston Trio, Bobby Darin, Bobby Vee, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers.
“We always concluded the evening with a few slow songs. Johnny Mathis was our absolute favorite! However, the two songs that were always the last dances were ‘Always and Forever’ and ‘Since I Don’t Have You.’ The lights were always turned off for the last dance, to which chaperones sometimes objected.”
The Teen Club had weekend outings like going to Rainbow Rollerland on Keeaumoku Street, often with a side trip to Scotty’s Drive-In for hamburgers and french fries next door, Elm said. Other outings were to places like Bellows Beach or Waimea Falls.
Joe Clare, who also lived at Fort Ruger around 1960, remembered attending several theme parties throughout the year.
“One example was ‘Sadie Hawkins Day,’ where the girls chased and grabbed a guy to ‘marry.’ My dad played the role of ‘Marrying Sam,’ the ‘minister’ who made all the relationships ‘legal.’”
‘You Can’t Take It With You’
“As we neared the summer of 1962, a few parents suggested that we put on a play,” Elm continued.
“They selected ‘You Can’t Take It With You,’ by Kauf-man and Hart. We thought it was a great idea! We wanted to do it just for the fun of it. We had no idea there was so much theatrical talent among the Ruger kids until we started rehearsals on the youth center stage.”
They spent several months rehearsing, including practicing lines each morning and afternoon on the school bus. Nearly all of the Ruger teens had a part in the play. Then that summer, they put on four performances, complete with full costumes, props and scenery, including one at Leahi Hospital for patients and staff.
Elm said they also enjoyed movies at the Ruger Theater — now named the Diamond Head Theater. It was only a dime for children and a quarter for adults.
Night climbing on Diamond Head
“Unbeknownst to our parents, we often climbed Diamond Head in the dead of night, which was illegal,” Elm continued. “There were tall fences all around the crater, some with barbed wire. MPs patrolled day and night to keep people out. Thus, it was quite a clandestine and stealth operation each time we went up. We were dressed in black and never used flashlights.
“Most of the time, we either went up over the side or went through the tunnel. The goal was always to get to the very highest peak of Diamond Head.
“We would usually have two people who were our ‘sacrificial lambs’ who would go first so that if they got caught, the others could scramble through unseen. The few that got caught were taken out by the MPs and told to go home.
“Every other month, one girl or another had a slumber party at her house to which all the girls were invited, and then several times a year we would have camp-outs in the middle of the field where we would pitch pup tents!”
Cannon Club
“Every summer we would all go to the Fort Ruger Cannon Club swimming pool. Many kids spent nearly every day there! Several of the older college-age kids were the lifeguards, and we had all sorts of fun water games and swimming races. We never got tired of the pool, and were so disappointed when summer ended and we could no longer go every day.
“A very special outing, which occurred several times a year, was a dinner banquet at the Cannon Club. The boys dressed up in suits and ties, and the girls dressed up in party dresses or gowns. We felt so grown up! We danced under the stars (it had an open ceiling) to the big-band sounds of the Canyon Club’s dance band.”
As they got older, many of them took jobs at the Cannon Club as dishwashers, busboys and later cooks, waiters, cocktail waitresses and bartenders. “Many of us worked our way through college on our Cannon Club jobs.”
Just married
“Probably the most ‘rascally’ thing we Ruger kids did was the night we played a trick on the MPs who patrolled Fort Ruger and Fort DeRussy.
“We knew their schedule, so on this particular Saturday night the boys pretended that one of their cars wasn’t working and needed help from the MPs.
“Meanwhile, we girls had made a huge, 5-foot-long banner that read ‘Just Married.’ When the boys and MPs looked under the hood, the girls taped the sign and crepe paper streamers to the back of the MPs’ car.
“The MPs got into Waikiki before someone alerted them to what we had done.”
Protests
In the early 1960s the Save Diamond Head campaign challenged the possibility of commercial development on its slopes.
“We painted three huge white sheets, each with large black letters spelling ‘SAVE DIAMOND HEAD.’
“We secured these sheets to the peak of Diamond Head and climbed back down before dawn. The two newspapers both printed photos of Diamond Head with the banner, and Aku mentioned it on his KGMB radio show in the morning.
“Now we ‘kids’ are all in or near our 70s,” Elm concluded. “However, those wonderful days growing up at Fort Ruger still feel so recent! Our memories of a treasured time are engraved forever.
“Every youth should have as wonderful, fulfilling, genuinely wholesome and innocent an experience growing up as we had at Fort Ruger in the sixties.”
Sounds idyllic. Do readers have their own stories about childhoods on local military bases?
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Have a question or suggestion? Contact Bob Sigall, author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books, at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
