Ouch! Share those memories around here and people will start calling you "kupuna"... way before my time but IIRC it's gone from Diaei to "Don Quixote", which name choice I still haven't figured out.
Don Quixote sounds weird! And yes, I probably qualify to be called that by now, I am so old. Don't have a grandkid yet so I won't take my mother's nickname of "tutu" quite yet.
Back in the 70's Holiday Mart was considered to be really modern and state of the art - - it had groceries and everything, "jus' like Mainlan' sto'ahs..."
Nords said:
There were only 12 of those steps kits on the container but by 9:05 she was the proud owner of #11.
That was quite an achievement! And if she had not done that, you probably wouldn't have seen those steps for another decade. When my father had our house built back in the 1960's, one of the biggest tasks was ordering all the building supplies in the correct order. The first thing he had to order, even before the ground was leveled or the slab poured, was the flu for the chimney (why he had one, I will never know). That had a 4-6 month lead time or more, as I recall.
And I remember "back in the day", it really made a huge difference if you paid for air mail postage because otherwise a letter could take a month or longer to get to the mainland.
Nords said:
HIW went out of business a short while later. When the state's first K-Mart took over their space, the opening-day crowds completely gridlocked Honolulu traffic for a 10-block radius.
I can't believe HIW is out of business. Not that I went there much (being a renter at the time), but that's another store that I think of as recent.
Nords said:
The big deal before the Web took off was being able to shop from the Navy Exchange's international catalog... even though you were technically stationed in America.
That's something we never tried! But then my ex and I were just dating in Hawaii, and didn't marry until shortly after he got transferred away, in 1975. He did take me with him into that big Navy Exchange, I think at the Pearl Harbor base a few times and it was pretty cool.
Even though Hawaii has changed so much in my lifetime, still I have wonderful memories of long ago. My friends and I would sit around in muu-muus or bikinis in the heat stringing ginger leis and orchid leis to wear just for fun, walk barefoot into Kailua town for shave ice or li hing mui, drink fresh coconut milk on the beach, body surf at Makapuu, mud slide at Nuuanu, skinny dip late at night at Kailua beach, climb through tropical rain forests to the top of the Pali, swim in isolated mountain pools, that kind of thing. Most of those activities are still possible even if it isn't possible to shop at Holiday Mart dressed only in one's string bikini any more.