When my family could afford it, I was enrolled at Maryknoll Catholic High School (co-ed) with an adjunct Civil Air Patrol regiment (boys only) in Honolulu. We were church-going Catholics, but up until I went to public schools in my home state of California. Upon my father’s transfer to the islands, my parents soon realized that the public school system on Oahu left much to be desired.
I wasn’t happy. 1966—my freshman high school year—was supposed to be about Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Stones, long hair and bell-bottoms. Rebellion against the military industrial complex and button-down America. Instead I got a Gomer Pyle haircut, a khaki uniform, and a handbook full of strict rules and regulations.
While some of the habit-wearing teachers-sisters were nice, I hated my year at Maryknoll. (My father pulled the plug for my sophomore year; it was back to snake-pit Kailua High School.) There are some good memories. A crush on friendly Lanii, a Chinese-American girl in my theology class. My first time on stage, playing the Young Rascals hit “Good Lovin’” at a lunchtime assembly. There was one officer who knew a misfit when he saw one, and barked his mustering orders more gently. And an incident, one afternoon, that filled me with ironically transgressive school pride.
Down the street and a few blocks over, was Punahou Prep School, an intermediate-to HS level academic institution whose student body represented the crème-de-la-crème of progressive Honolulu society. Only five years after my stint at Maryknoll, in 1971, future President Barack Obama would be enrolled at Punahou, from which he graduated in 1979. To say that Punahou kids were the cool kids and we were the Catholic/Military uncool kids is an understatement.
There was a stop-light at Alexander Ave., the busy thoroughfare that passes in front of Maryknoll, and often students leaving at the end of the day would cross the street and enter the neighborhoods or link up with parents waiting in cars. One balmy afternoon a carload of Punahou boys pulled up and blocked the crosswalk. The light changed to green for pedestrians, but the boys didn’t move. They were laughing, and mocking the Maryknoll students, mostly girls, unable to cross.
As I watched, unhappy in my baggy pants, waiting for my carpool pickup, four senior cadets ran out and surrounded the offending vehicle. As anyone who’s spent time in the tropics knows, if you don’t have air conditioning in your vehicle, you keep the windows open. After some heated words, my classmates started throwing punches through those windows. I’m talking right-cross haymakers into the faces of sitting ducks. The problem for the Punahou boys then was that the light changed again; they now had a red light in a busy intersection. The Maryknoll boys kept up the pummeling all through that red cycle. By the time the light changed again, the smiles had been irrevocably wiped off the mocking, prep-boy faces.
On the carpool ride back to Kailua, I recounted the episode, putting emphasis on the quality and accuracy of the punches. My fellow travelers were in seventh heaven hearing the details. We grinned like vindictive ghouls over the fate of the Punahou boys. Our religious upbringing included the idealized virtue of “turning the other cheek.” When smote, offer the other cheek, to signal a forgiving “godliness.” We were taught to strive to love our neighbor, even those who persecuted us. Many of us, even those who’d lapse from the faith, would ultimately aspire to that lofty Christian value.
But we were young, struggling to negotiate a world of upwardly mobile parents, the strictures of a parochial school, and a mid-1960s world on the precipice of generational upheaval. In that context, the beat-down of the Punahou boys was an unqualified victory.