Center for Labor Education & Research, University of Hawaii - West Oahu: Honolulu Record Digitization Project
Honolulu Record, Volume 10 No. 17, Thursday, November 21, 1957 p. 7
A Proud and Happy Woman: "Aunt Jennie" Wilson at Home With Memories of Johnny & Their World
Our reporter friend — for a change — wasn't out on a beef this time. He said he wanted to drop in on Aunt Jennie, widow of Honolulu's late Mayor Johnny Wilson, "She's 86," he said, "and right on."
We drove down Waialae Ave. and where it runs into Kalanianaole Hiway at the Kahala junction we turned left into Oili Rd. that runs unpaved up the valley of Waialae Nui.
Greeted by Brownie
The road ended at a high gate. It opens into the premises of Johnny Wilson's brick works. We drove through and continued up a trail worn by autos. The place had a ranch atmosphere about it — algaroba trees, rank grass and the hills of the valley on each side.
Right ahead, clear in the sunshine, was Puu Lanipo, the highest (2,621 ft.) peak on that section of the Koolau Ranges, the northern boundary of the Honolulu city's limits. We came to Aunt Jennie's home and parked in the front yard.
The house is built on a foundation of rocks cemented together to last forever. Jennie was in a koa rocking chair on a wide lanai. She waved and greeted us. Her dog Brownie trotted down the front step and checked us in.
He looked just like Laika, the Soviet dog who gave her life in Sputnik II to increase man's scientific knowledge. Jennie said Johnny had found Brownie lost as a pup in the hills 14 years ago.
We sat in deep, low chairs on the long lanai. We thought immediately of the political bull sessions Johnny Wilson must have held in this comfortable place with his Democrat cronies. An ideal place for hatching political strategy;—no walls with ears, no keyholes. Just algaroba trees and the hills and the tradewind in the quiet valley, a thousand miles, as it were, from the turmoil of the city.
Lives With Johnny
Jennie set aside some sewing she was doing and smiled right at us with her lively, expressive eyes. At her side was a table stacked with books and on top of them there was a colored lithograph of Christ propped against the wall. He stood with outspread arms and a beatific smile. We thought of the many times Jennie, a Catholic, must turn to Him when she is alone and fortify herself with thoughts about His courage and understanding.
Jennie wore a neck to ankle black dress. Her hair was caught up under a black net with a yellow ribbon tied around her forehead. She wore a pair of Johnny's sox and the leather slippers he'd worn at the hospital for so long. She wore, too, an Aloha Week short of brown tapa design which had been given to Johnny when he was Mayor by the Honolulu Jaycees.
Jennie is still in love with Johnny. You can tell by her clear, clear memories and admiration of him. She laughed with the happiness and abandon of a teenager as she said that she wears his slippers and sox and shirts because "he liked them and so do I."
"I Scolded Him Good"
"Johnny was a good man," she said. "He didn't smoke or drink. Only once he became drunk. He was in town at a political meeting and phoned to say he'd be late. Later I heard the car drive into the garage. But he didn't come inside. I went out. He was passed out on the front seat.
"I brought him inside and he fell asleep on the bed in his clothes, boots and all. Waste time to talk with a drunken mind so I peeled off his clothes and let him sleep.
"Next day he felt awful. I scolded him good. He know he'd been foolish. That was the last time he touched liquor."
We learned a lot from Jennie Wilson as we listened to her unreel her memories — a veritable panorama of the Americanization of these islands through the eyes of a gentle, tolerant Hawaiian.
She Isn't Bitter
In the same way as haoles have memory milestones like the First and Second World Wars, Hawaiians like Jennie have milestones like the Monarchy, the Missionaries, the Provisional Government, and then Annexation. She was a witness of all these historic episodes and speaks of them today as clearly as though they were just yesterday.
Jennie isn't bitter. She isn't angry when she says: "They gave Japan back to the Japanese, and gave back Samoa, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Why didn't they return these islands to the Hawaiians?"
When Jennie raises such questions, she does so as a witness of injustice. Her memories, her questions, are put gently so that, to us, they became a lament of a people compelled to submit at gunpoint.
She told us that, as a girl, she had a big yen to see the world whence the haoles came. So she went as a hula dancer with the first troupe to visit the Mainland. (At the age of 14 she started dancing for Kalakaua and kept at it after he became king.) Jennie was a star turn and the troupe was such a big hit on the Mainland vaudeville circuit that they went on to Europe.
Met Johnny in Chicago
There the troupe danced and sang for the crowned heads of Europe from London to Berlin, from St. Petersburg to Constantinople, How did the Kings and Kaisers and Czars and their courtiers look to Jennie's young Hawaiian eyes?
She said: "They looked brave and big in their uniforms like military big shots. But when I looked into their eyes, I could tell they were unhappy. They needed a lot of Hawaiian aloha. I felt sorry for them."
On the way back from Europe, Jennie met Johnny Wilson in Chicago. They were both 24. He was managing a tour of Hawaiian Band — another big hit on the vaudeville circuit. They'd, been childhood playmates. Now they simply fell in love.
Back home in Honolulu, Johnny's mother refused to allow him to marry a hula dancer.
Said Jennie: "The haole snobs in those days looked upon hula dancers as evil scum. They'd snap awful words at me even as I walked to church with mother. One day when I was alone I hit a haole from one of the 'best' families with my umbrella when he insulted, me."
Jennie understands how the Negro school children in . Little Rock and too many other places must feel today when they are spat upon and jeered at and newspapers publish "news" photographs of the inhuman incidents.
Trusted Johnny
Johnny and Jennie respected his mother's feelings, but finally she passed on and in 1908 they were married. Johnny became a builder —of sewer systems, roads, breakwaters and even of the highway over the Pali. And he built respect for social new deals along democratic lines and that's why the people of Hawaii came to love and respect him and to keep him as Mayor of Honolulu for 18 years.
And through it all, at his side, Jennie labored with Johnny, her dynamo. On the land they leased at Waialae, they ran 60 head of cattle and pigs and chickens.
She laughed: "I worked so hard I was half man, half woman. But it was worth it. Folks always smiled when they saw Johnny. He worked for them. They trusted him.
We felt like intruders as we sat and listened to Jennie's stream of memories. She rocked gently in her chair. Her slender fingers gripped the arms. On one wrist is a gold bracelet she got in Europe and on the other there is a series of narrow silver rings she got in Chicago. She has never removed them. They jingle softly and keep her memories fresh.
A Woman in Love
Away in the distance, as we talked, there was the rumble of propeller-driven aircraft and occasionally the whoosh of a jet. Brownie, Jennie's dog, lay asleep on the cool cement floor at her feet. An ivory-colored Big Ben clocked at her elbow, ticking away the time.
We glanced at the lithograph of Christ and we thought of Little Rock and Sputnik and missionaries with villainous adventurers at their elbows and the bayonets of imperialism and of Queen Liliuokalani incarcerated by them.
We looked at Jennie and watched her lovely eyes, and, as we did. we heard the beat of gourds and we saw a flowing-haired hula dancer proudly performing for Kalakaua with "all the innocence of her young heart and soul.
We saw, too, the arrival and the spreading of the malihini gospel that was to soon end, too soon, the way of life of a too-trusting people in the name of the gentle Man in the lithograph at Jennie's, elbow.
Brownie the dog sat up suddenly and scratched away at a flea. It came time for us to go. Jennie held out a slender hand and said aloha and smiled — as only a woman in love can smile.
We thought of Johnny. We wondered if there really is an after-life in which we may again be with those we love.
We hoped so because what a swell reward that would be for Jennie and her Johnny. They'd have so much to say to each other.
Before we went down the front steps, we glanced at the Man in the lithograph — and said a silent prayer. —W. S.H.
It is only common humanity to feed the hungry. If our hospitals are too big, too complex, too impersonal to do these small kindnesses for the sick, something is very wrong.