CLARA OTOME TOBARA

One year, while visiting Honolulu's City Hall Christmas Tree display, Clara's adult son suggested they board a horse drawn open carriage for a ride.  For weeks that followed, she express her great joy from that ride.  It brought back to her cherished memories as a child riding with her father on his wagon.

 

 

Clara's father occasionally took his little girl along on a horse drawn wagon that was his merchandise delivery business from Hilo to Olaa (now known as Keeau) on Hawaii's Big Island.  That was a door opening in her life.

 

 

She looked forward to and never forgot those hours spent riding with her father who encouraged and complimented her on her singing on the long ride.

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In her preteen years, Clara Otome Tobara traveled on her first ocean voyage with her father from Hilo to Okinawa, Japan, where he had immigrated from. This was another of the many doors that opened in her life. It was her first experience with her vulnerability to motion sickness, that she willingly endured many times to be rewarded with the memories of a life that none of her girl friends could imagine.

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In that far off country, she enjoyed the songs she heard and was invited to sing along to. She cherished the memories of her joy of singing there in front of her audience of complimenting relatives.  The joy outweighed its cost of motion illness.

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Clara's father was a business minded farm laborer who saved and quit working for the sugar plantation to work on land he bought. Clara was born in Olaa on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Surviving 2 older siblings who died of illness as toddlers, she became the oldest of 6 children. They grew up in a huge house on a vast country farm that her father bought in Pepeekeo, about 30 miles from Olaa.

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As a child she played with guard dogs around the property, with cats that controlled mice, and among chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats, and hogs.  Her father would lift her on horses to ride, on milking cows, and on plow pulling mules.  She followed her mother during the day learning to gather eggs and to tend to the animals.  

 

The farm was shaded by an orchard of trees abundant with oranges. She helped her mother grow produce, anthuriums and orchids. As an adult puttering around her own home, Clara enjoyed tending to those same floral plants especially her favorite, roses.

 

After her school years she worked as a nurse's aide at the plantation hospital near her home. On days off she did what led to one of her life passions, she was a featured singing star on a Hilo radio show.

 

During those days without airplanes, she travel by inter-island ship to Honolulu to visit her cousins and favored aunt and uncle who owned a coffee shop, a saimin noodle stand and a taxi cab.

 

 

On those trips to the big city, she helped baby sit and especially enjoyed going to the movies with her younger cousins. The only negative? Her sea sickness traveling to and from her Hilo home. Besides singing, another door was opening for her, this time with movies.

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Even as an adult living with her family in Honolulu, Clara continued visiting those cousins, aunt and uncle she was fond of, in their huge home. There were many evenings spent playing cards and sharing a special dish or dessert she prepared. Thanksgiving dinners with them became an anticipated and memorable annual tradition. What about the door related to movies that opened?

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Movie theaters during Clara's youth were simple. Some with no roof and only plank seating. In Honolulu, theaters were modern and enclosed and became something special to look forward to when visiting her cousins. Movies were black and white but with the “talkies”, Clara became an avid movie fan.

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Her younger brother, Roy, and sister, Susan, remember being read to by Clara and reminded often to devote their time to reading books.  Among the many gift books they received were Shirley Temple photo books after each movie Clara viewed.

 

Many years later, when black and white movies replayed on her first TV set, Clara often called out the names of the movie stars and related stories to her sons of how she personally and regularly met with those stars. It began when she got married.

 

Time flew by for Clara and in her twenties, she was the only one among her girl friends who was not married. Then one of the most significant doors in what was to become an exciting chapter in her life opened.

 

Clara was shown a letter from an older man, 10 years her senior, who also was born on the Big Island.  He lived in Los Angeles where he owned a successful produce market near a movie studio. He asked to meet and to marry a local, as yet unknown, ethnic Okinawan lady from his hometown which also was, Pepeekeo.

 

It was Clara's dream come true. A guy of her ethnic culture whose own profitable business was right near the 20th Century Fox movie studio, and he seemed as dashing as Errol Flynn or even Tarzan's Buster Crabbe. Never mind motion sickness, she was on the next boat to Hollywood to meet him.  Well, not quite. Let's slow this movie down for a moment.  Here's what really happened.

 

Photos were exchanged by mail and with Clara's beauty it was now the other way around. When her future husband Sam saw photos of Clara, HE rushed to Hilo to formally meet her and they were married in a week. That's right. All ln just one week! This part is true because her new smiling, proud husband, Sam, had a business he had to rush back to. Yes, by very slow cruise ship to California at the agonizing cost of motion sickness for Clara.

 

Clara's love of movies made her new job helping her husband an exciting experience she never forgot. Movie stars she recognized were frequent customers of Sam and Clara's Pico Boulevard business.  They would frequently consult her asking produce related questions that she could easily answer from having grown up on a farm.

 

 

Her sons teased their Mom that the actors, especially the men, often visited the market mostly to converse with Clara, not only because she was from exotic Hawaii, but more likely because of her innocent appearing beauty.

 

In those days that market, a short stroll from the movie studio, with it's sandwiches, coffee and bottled beverages met the need that today's McDonalds does. There were no restaurants or coffee shops nearby surrounding the studio.

 

Before all of those meetings with movie stars, Clara was presented with a great excitement that her friends back home would never, ever imagine.

 

 

The last “M” in MGM Studios is for owner Louis B. Mayer. His cooking chef, who was Sam's customer, invited Clara and Sam to celebrate their wedding at Mr. Mayer's mansion. Sam borrowed a friend's Model T and drove Clara to Mayer's huge mansion. She remembers the drive as very long, before interstate highways, and hot and dusty before air conditioned cars.

 

Did she refresh herself in the Mayer's pool? What was the mansion like? Who were the movie stars she met there? What was the live band like? Who did she dance with?  What were the Mayers like?

 

Clara always smiled as she recalled a huge kitchen, like schools have, where the luncheon wedding celebration was held. It was just Clara and Sam with their host, the chef, and a couple of cooks. Mr. Mayer was on a trip and there were no movie stars, nor live band, nor tour of the quiet mansion. It, however, continued to be a very memorable event that Clara would often proudly and cheerfully recall.

 

 

When Clara watched a Charlie Chan movie on TV, she'd often smile at "number one son" who referred to Charlie Chan as "Pop".  In those black and white movies, Charlie Chan's son was played by actor Keye Luke who was also Sam's customer.

 

 

From Mr. Luke, Clara and Sam learned of the apartment that they move in to. Their next door neighbor was Keye Luke's brother who also was an actor.

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In those days the famed hillside Hollywood sign was clearly visible every morning when Clara walked down a lane from that apartment to catch a trolley and join her husband who started work at the market earlier.  On a visit after fifty years and dozens of high rises, that sign, to Clara's disappointment, was no longer visible as she remembers admiring it from her trolley stop.

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About three years after she married, Pearl Harbor was attacked and Clara's Hollywood dream life ended.  Another door in her movie-like life opened.

 

 

Within weeks the couple were forced to give up their market.  Along with other Japanese families in Los Angeles, Sam and Clara were bused, with only what they could carry, to the Santa Anita horse racetrack.

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There they scrubbed and cleaned a horse stable that they were forced to live in for weeks. Clara never expressed any bitterness whenever she recalled this humiliating part of her life and these demeaning experiences.

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Following that, their new adventure continued on a train, with windows blacked out, as they traveled to their new, very meager home hundreds of miles away. Strangely, her motion sickness was minimal.

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During the next four years they lived in a barbed wire enclosed, armed guarded, concentration or “internment” prison-like camp at dusty Amache also known as Lamar.  Like Clara and Sam, all their neighbors were Japanese and, with very few exceptions, proud American citizens who were born in the U.S.A.

 

 

In contrast, back home in Hawaii where the Army, Navy and the Air corps' most critical bases were committed to winning the war in the Pacific, very few of the 150,000 Japanese were imprisoned, compared to 120,000 along the West Coast.  

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Amache is near Granada town in southern Colorado on the state line with the open Kansas plains. Concrete foundations of the prison camp are preserved there as a memorial today. The local high school responsibly cares for that site that symbolizes a shameful act in America's history that should never be forgotten.

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No matter how much Clara and Sam tried to seal it off, on windy days sand and dust coated the inside of their tiny room. When they got there, it was furnished only with cots and a heater. Their room was part of a newly built wooden one story military style barracks with other curtain-less rooms that housed families. Families that included lots of children. 

 

Click on the arrowhead at the center of the photo to view video.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winters were bone chilling and Clara never forgot what it was like living in snow at the camp versus merely looking at it on the Big Island's Mauna Kea peak from her father's home. Clara and Sam cherished their coal burning heater on those chilly and windy days.

 

Imagine during those winters, doing what Clara and Sam were forced to do. They had to walk outside from their room, without slipping on the ice, to get to the mess hall for meals and to a toilet building to shower or relieve themselves. Shocking? Here's what else they endured.

 

Those showers, did not have any partitions and in that toilet building ladies were also forced, military style, to be humiliated as they sat and relieved themselves, next to each other, without partitions for privacy.

 

Sobering after being star-struck mingling daily with famous movie stars.

 

As scrap wood from packing crates became available, Sam and other men in the camp, built partitions in those showers and toilets, and also furniture like chairs, closets, dressers and other comforts.

 

Clara and her neighbors sewed used flour bags they salvaged at their mess hall into curtains, table cloth and stuffed Raggedy Ann style dolls. They colored their projects with crayons.

 

This lifestyle was not as challenging for Clara as it was for the other ladies who openly complained in the camp. She was toughened by growing up on a farm with outhouses, kerosene lanterns and stoves, firewood heated furo bath water and helping her mother save cooking fat, boiled water on an open fire for laundry and sewed her kid brothers' and sister's clothing from used cotton rice bags.

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Those years in the camp were a source of fond memories for Clara as she worked and socialized exclusively among Japanese-Americans. She learned more about the Japanese culture versus the Okinawan culture and she started speaking English like a "kotonk" or mainland U.S. born Japanese. She stayed in touch by letters for years with friends she had met in the camp.

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Some of her memories of her neighbors there came with the birth of her first child. Neighbors helped and constantly looked in on her. This was far beyond what she might have benefited from had the birth occurred in Los Angeles. In L.A., aside from Keye Luke's brother, she barely knew any of her neighbors.

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Caring for an infant was nothing new for Clara, though. As a child she changed diapers and baby sat her younger brothers and sister while her mother and father

toiled in the cane fields and on the farm. A brother born right after

her, Eddie, often assisted Clara and they grew very close playing

and working together while still children themselves.

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In the camp, less than a month after giving birth, Clara got the tragic news of her brother, Eddie. He was killed in action in Anzio, Italy while fighting the Nazis during World War II. He served with the decorated 100th Battalion of the all Japanese-American 442nd Combat Regiment. She continued to be impressed with how generous camp residents were with their continued consoling and support.

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Despite the disrespectful treatment they received, those camp residents frequently, and proudly, demonstrated and acclaimed their patriotism for the U.S. During their entire lives, Clara and Sam often expressed their pride and gratitude in being American and for the opportunities that came with that special status.

 

Click on the arrowhead in the center to view this Amache video:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JocOQIruvfE

https://youtu.be/CmQoOcamxJw

 

Besides frequently singing and reading to them as toddlers, Clara patiently took the time to correct her young sons when they first started singing the “Star Spangled Banner” or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. She often sang along when she heard “America” and “God Bless America” on the radio and on television.

 

A part of being a good American, she insisted, was speaking “good English” and Clara never let her sons forget that. She had no tolerance for, “I no like” or “I no can”.  She also continually reminded them that she was not going to be around to take care of them forever.  It was her way of motivating them to be self sustaining especially when it came to tying their own shoe laces or dressing themselves.

 

Although she did not attend church or temple regularly, Clara, more out of familiarity from her parents influence, related to Buddhism. It was by insisting on being American however, that her busiest time of the year was her dedication to Christmas. She learned a lot from her fellow camp residents. A decorated, lit tree, her hand made red and white flannel stockings each embroidered with her son's names and then hung, writing and mailing cards, shopping, having her toddler sons climb on the lap of the department store Santa, gift wrapping, visiting relatives to deliver gifts and baking desserts annually, filled her Holiday agenda.

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At a reunion about 50 years after the war, the friendliness of a former camp resident, about 15 years Clara's junior whom she could not recall, puzzled her. Her oldest son asked him how it was that he remembered Clara. He revealed that although she was married, Clara was among the beauties in the camp who was impossible for the then young teenage boys not to frequently notice and admire.

 

 

Clara's mother revealed that among her European heritage, a great, great, great, the actual count of "greats" is unknown, grandfather was a redheaded Dutchman.  More likely a sailor than a diplomat.  This explained Clara's larger than typical Asian eyes.

 

When the war ended, Clara and Sam lived in Denver a

year before deciding to sail back home to Hawaii on the

cruise ship Matsonia. Another door was opening as Clara

suffered motion sickness on the entire voyage. She

remained in her stateroom as her inquisitive 3 year old son

wandered the decks asking endless questions of his father

who patiently struggled to answer without Clara to take

them.

 

Clara and Sam settled in Honolulu for the balance of their

lives with a furniture upholstery business. Clara enjoyed

gardening around her home among her continued favorites

of roses, orchids and anthuriums.

 

She loved knitting and crocheting. She spent mornings

browsing the news and doing crossword puzzles over coffee

then watching soap operas on TV. Many TV shows were

video versions of radio programs she had listened to daily in

the 1950's.

 

She was a skilled cook and baker. With her toddler son in tow, she often went shopping on a spur of the moment for ingredients to surprise Sam when he returned home from work to a special dish, pie or cookies. Her sons remember watching her prepare toll house cookies or pies, especially apple pies, Sam's favorite, and licking the spoon when they were children.

 

Although a small grocery store was a few doors away from their tiny apartment on Kinau Street, Clara regularly walked a much longer distance. With her now 5 year old son, they walked down Ward Avenue along Thomas Square then beside a green wooden fence that hid the Ward estate's mansion in a coconut plantation. Today it's the Neal Blaisdell Center. That weekly routine of dressing up and putting on shoes preceeded that long walk to, and back home from, the second branch of Hawaii's first supermarket, Foodland, on Kapiolani Boulevard.

 

Clara would often be seen carefully removing the fat and skin from chicken thighs before, not frying, but oven broiling them. Her explanation for her extra effort was that eating chicken that way was better for your health. Like Sam, she didn't drink or smoke. Her health concerns might explain her long life.

 

Another routine of Clara's was her weekly visit to her favorite beauty shop on Sheridan Street behind what is Walmart today. This started when it was a short walk from the family's apartment home on Young Street behind the historic old Civic Auditorium.

 

After her hair was done she'd walk to the Ala Moana Shopping Center and browse in the aisles of Liberty House and Shirokiya department stores before walking the entire length of Keeaumoku Street, to get home.

 

In his later years, after they moved, Sam would save Clara a bus ride and pick her up at the shopping center and drive her home to Manoa and then years later to their home in Salt Lake-Moanalua.

 

Clara continued her beauty shop routine after Sam passed away with bus rides and walks home from the bus stop. During the past years when Clara was forced to use a walker, her younger son, Ron, like his father, patiently drove her to get her hair done, weekly, right up to her life's final month. Clara's pleasure was obvious before and when she came home from those outings.

 

 

For 10 years after Sam suffered a severe stroke, Clara patiently attended and fed him during the day until her sons returned home from work to assist.  Sacrifices were willingly made by the family for a husband and father who himself made numerous and recognized sacrifices for his family.

 

 

Before Sam passed on over 20 years ago, Clara traveled with him to Iowa and a few times to Japan, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and to San Francisco. With smoother jet travel Clara expressed relief that she rarely suffered from her motion illness and could even nap on the flight.

 

At ninety three years old, six years ago, Clara's eyesight started to fade and she gave up her newspaper crossword puzzles, magazines, Reader's Digest and watching television.

 

Soon she gave up gardening as she couldn't walk without her walker, then she was forced to use a wheel chair.

 

There was one thing that Clara enjoyed which started with her memorable wagon rides with her father. She was able to do this until she was freed from her physical loses just before the last door in her life opened.

 

Along with her eyesight, her hearing got bad and she gave up listening and singing along to her karaoke tapes. In 2015, the year that last door in her life opened, although bedridden, Clara was heard enthusiastically singing, from memory, her favorite karaoke songs with her two hands clutched...as if in prayer or re-living herself as a child singing alongside her father on a horse drawn wagon.

 

Clara Otome Tobara

February 8, 1916 - November 23, 2015

 

 

 

 

 

Click on arrowhead at center to view video.

 

 

 

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