BACK TO SCHOOL EXCITEMENT

News stories and store ads of back-to-school shopping remind me of the excitement I felt preparing for a new school year each September.
My siblings and I had helped all summer on our small truck farm and so going back to school was an anticipated respite. Best of a;;, we could go school shopping and get some new things!
For us country kids, going to Honolulu’s department stores was like a much anticipated field trip. We’d already listed everything we wished, although knew we couldn’t afford all since my family was large, our parents’ income small.
We were especially thrilled to go to Kress’s. What a delight to find everything we wanted there at the famous but now defunct five and dime store.
Kress’s had a cornucopia of things and displays we rural kids could only gawk at. The soda fountain where sophisticated city folk dined was especially alluring. It was my secret desire, not fulfilled until I was a working adult, to sip a milkshake or savor an ice cream sundae at the counter.
Our parents gave us money to buy pencils, tablets, crayons
and sometimes a pencil box or a fancy eraser. WE didn’t have back packs but home sewn totes into which we put our books and supplies.
The wonderful day was topped with an ice cream sandwich that cost only a dime.
On the way to the country limo that was bus service to the rural areas, we window shopped at the department stores, wishing we could buy clothes dressed on the mannequins.
But ready made store clothes were not in our parents’ budget. Instead, a fabric peddler visited farmhouses to sell yardage from his van. My mother allowed us to choose cloth for five new dresses to replace outgrown ones. Of course I often had to accept hand-me-downs from older sisters so didn’t get all new clothing.
The fabric peddler was our parents’ “landsman”(i.e., someone from the same village in Okinawa) so he trusted Mother to put the charges on her tab, meanwhile enjoying “talking story” which in pidgin means to catch up on gossip.
On a day free of farm chores, my older sisters and I trooped over to a dressmaker who lived on a distant farm, sometimes taking a short cut walking on the banks of taro patches along the way to arrive at her house. She was a stay-at-home mom who earned extra money sewing for neighbors while her children were in bed or at school. We’d select styles from the Sear’s catalog and she copied them as similar as possible.
Mother always directed they were sewn to “grow into” so at the beginning of each school year we looked almost matronly in oversized dresses until we later achieved more height and weight.
Later, when my sister and I were freshmen, my mother insisted we attend summer sewing classes run by the minister’s wife. Now there was no need to hire a dressmaker as she and and I sewed for the entire family. Although the garments didn’t look professionally sewn, they had to do. I kept sewing for years afterwards for myself, my husband and children, until fabric and pattern costs got prohibitively higher. Now when I need clothing, I go to the department stores and invariably ask myself,”can I sew it cheaper?” and the answer is a resounding NO! so my sewing machine remains dormant.
Reminiscing about school shopping leaves me nostalgic for the halcyon days of our youth, and I still enjoy hearing school bells ring.