Old School Spirit

More than three decades after being abandoned to the elements, vandals and arson, Maui’s first public high school is kindling a passion for renewal.

  
At the same time, the faculty emphasized values of democracy and equality as they guided their young charges in creating a society in miniature, with representative government, a student police force and court, service clubs and cultural activities. Though the student body included its share of kolohe (mischievous) boys who found out-of-the-way corners to smoke and throw dice, Maui High was a remarkably civilized and peaceful place to learn.
 
At the center of school life was the administration building designed by architect Charles W. Dickey, a Maui boy who would become famous for creating a distinctive Hawaiian style of architecture. He drew up plans for a single-story, reinforced-concrete school with a U-shaped layout, built in the Spanish Mission Revival style. The building opened with great ceremony in December 1921, and became the school’s emblem, its broad front steps the favored place for yearbook pictures.
   
Lorraine Sato Tamaribuchi recalls what that building meant to students coming from dusty camps where families squeezed into tiny cottages that often had no indoor plumbing. “It was such a gift to kids like us,” Tamaribuchi recalls. Each day the wide, shallow steps of this quietly elegant building welcomed the students, its side wings stretched out like open arms, raising their expectations about what life might offer.
   
Many Maui High graduates grew to prominence, on Maui and beyond. They included noted ethnobotanist Beatrice Krauss; Bank of Hawai‘i President Wilson Cannon; James Y. Ohta, first Asian-American executive in the Boy Scouts of America; Earl Isao Tanaka, The Maui News managing editor, and his photographer brother Wayne. There were judges: Hawai‘i Supreme Court Justice Soichi Ogata, Harriette Holt, Kase Higa and George Fukuoka; and politicians: U.S. Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink, Maui Mayors Elmer Cravalho, Hannibal Tavares and Alan Arakawa, Maui County Councilwoman Velma McWayne Santos, state Senator Mamoru Yamasaki.