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I wrote about Fort Ruger two weeks ago. Barb Miller Elm wrote eloquently about her idyllic childhood on the base that is now Kapiolani Community College.
Jim Muir suggested I research Fort Kamehameha, another coastal artillery base. It guarded the Diamond Head side of the mouth of Pearl Harbor. Its “sister,” Fort Weaver, guarded the Ewa side.
Queen Emma had a summer home amid a grove of coconut trees there 150 years ago.
Walter Dillingham created a camp at the same spot to house employees who built the Pearl Harbor dry docks and dredged the channel entrance around 1909. It was called Watertown.
Fort Kamehameha began as an Army garrison in 1913. It had a store, library, church, restaurant, mess hall, a theater that could seat more than 400, miniature golf course, two swimming pools, a boxing arena, tennis and basketball courts, baseball diamonds, bowling alleys and other amenities.
A noisy base
Suzanne Casart told me she was the oldest of 12 children and was 14 years old when her family moved to Fort Kamehameha in 1962.
“Ft. Kam’s location was a noisy one,” Casart says, “with the Honolulu International Airport, the Hawaii Air National Guard and Hickam Air Force Base on the three sides that were not the harbor. Jet engines were tested almost nightly, it seemed, and the roar was something we soon learned to sleep through.
“We went to outdoor movies on Hickam, church services at the Sub Base, and the commissaries at several bases.
“On weekends we often went to the beach at Fort DeRussy, where the old wooden snack bar was a huge treat. There was a raft offshore that we swam to and dived off.
“After an exhausting, fun-filled day, Dad would drive back home, stopping at Jet Burger for an order of 12 identical hamburgers.”
Aircraft carrier
“My biggest adventure was the day my friend Betsy and I jumped in a boat moored near her house and rowed out to the large concrete platform that anchored one end of a chain that could be raised to close off the entrance to Pearl Harbor, should any foreign subs approach.
“We were happily sunning ourselves on that platform when a huge aircraft carrier sailed by. All its sailors lined up on deck and, we imagined, stared at us in our relatively modest two-piece bathing suits. We were mortified! And then the wake of the carrier threatened to wash us right into the ocean! We did not repeat that stunt.”
Duck and cover
“Military buses picked us up for school and took us to Fort Shafter, where we changed buses to head to our respective schools. I remember riding with kids who went to Punahou and Saint Louis. I went to Maryknoll, and my younger siblings went to Holy Family.
“At school we practiced the ‘duck and cover’ defense from nuclear attack, while we each kept a Pan Am bag of survival rations and a change of clothes on hooks that lined the back hallway of our horseshoe-shaped quarters.
“We had evacuation drills when sirens sounded, marched through the hall, grabbed our bags and ended up in one of the bunkers at our end of the base. I think it was stocked with tins of crackers from World War II.”
One night the sirens went off when her parents had gone to Waikiki to meet a visiting aunt. “She didn’t know — and would not have approved — that my mother had recently given birth to our little sister, who was left in my care.
“This time the sirens signaled an approaching tsunami. I calmly gathered all nine (at the time) siblings and our gear while we waited for a bus to take us to Tripler.
“My panicked parents drove up just as we were boarding the bus. I was shocked that they did not trust me to get us all to safety.
“But the night at Tripler was exciting. We played on the adjustable beds and hung out on the lanai, expecting to see the Fort Kamehameha lights near the shore disappear under water. They did not.
“Other than a pretty impressive tidal surge that came up to the top of our front porch, our home was untouched.”
Phone privileges
Casart says the children were trained to answer the phone, “Major Casart’s quarters. Suzanne speaking.”
“He was a captain when I first learned to answer, and I had a hard time adjusting with each promotion. We kids could talk to friends on the phone, but only for two minutes. After that, Dad just hung up on whomever we were talking to. We did NOT make many personal calls!
“My dad often called us by rank (I made it to sergeant!) or just ‘daughter.’ We addressed him only as Dad or sir. Mother was Mother or ma’am.
“Everyone else was just a private. It was a simple way to evade recalling individual names AND reinforced the chain of command. Mother was always second in command, but often busy with meal prep and baby care, so I was automatically ‘in charge’ and my siblings knew they had to follow my orders!”
Hickam AFB was founded 25 years after Fort Kamehameha in 1938 because the Army Air Service outgrew Luke Field on Ford Island. I asked Casart if the residents felt they were part of Hickam AFB or separate from it.
“We didn’t think of ourselves as being IN Hickam,” she replied, “although we had to drive through Hickam to reach our home.
“That is, unless we went around the back of the airport, Lagoon Drive, past Keehi Lagoon.”
Fort Kamehameha extended along the coast from the mouth of Pearl Harbor all the way to Keehi Lagoon, and in the 1960s, before the reef runway and Mamala Bay Golf Course were built, anyone could drive onto the base that way. There were no sentries.
“There were dusty fields with kiawe trees that provided a buffer zone all around us,” Casart concluded. “We built a fort in the tree next to our house — must be an Army brat thing! We always built some sort of fort wherever we lived!”
Meg Barth Gammon said her family lived at Fort Kamehameha in 1973 and 1974.
“We were new to Hawaii so everything was fresh and exciting. We lived a stone’s throw from ‘the beach’ (aka the entrance to Pearl Harbor).”
Ahiahi time
Her mom and dad had cocktails in the evening on “the beach” even with screaming planes overhead, courtesy of the new reef runway.
“Mom called it ‘ahiahi time,’ meaning evening. She had a phone installed on the beach. Yep, when mom decided to do something, Hawaiian Tel was not going to talk her out of it. They ran a cord to a coconut tree and put the phone inside a metal ammunition case that was locked. This was long before cellphones. Dad’s job at Camp Smith required him to answer phone calls at any time of the day.”
The overhead planes were the worst sound ever, Gammon says. “If we were on the phone, we stopped talking until the planes passed.
“I have a feeling that the screaming planes were the death knell for Fort Kamehameha homes. They were built in the early 1900s and had screens to let in the ocean breeze, which meant there was no getting away from the noise.”
About 1,000 personnel were stationed at Fort Kamehameha at its peak. World War II showed that the coastal artillery system was obsolete, and Fort Kamehameha was absorbed into Hickam AFB in 1992.
Suzanne Casart went on to become a teacher. She taught English at ‘Iolani school for 29 years. Meg Gammon has been a substitute teacher for 20 years and is also a cashier at Longs.
Did you grow up on a local military base? Send me an email if you wish to share your story.
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The Rearview Mirror Insider is Bob Sigall’s 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!
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