Kubasaki High graduates return
to Okinawa, find a host of changes
By Mark Oliva, Okinawa
bureau
Mark Oliva / Stars and Stripes
Kubasaki High School alumni tour Shuri Castle on Okinawa. |
SHURI — Dee Gregory has fond memories of growing up in Okinawa in the late 1940s
and early 50s.
Postwar life on this tropical island offered powdered eggs and powdered milk. Her
mother shopped for green Army cans at the commissary, never really knowing what was
inside. Everything was cooked on two-burner hot plates.
That was just home life.
School was a Quonset hut in the vicinity of what is now Naha Port. Buses were
ambulances, and she was one of 12 in the Kubasaki High School graduating class of 1952.
Kubasaki alumni returned to the island last week, touring sights from Nago in the north
to Naha in the south. They also visited the present site of Kubasaki High School on Camp
Foster, the school’s third location.
"I wore combat boots to my eighth-grade formal," said Gregory, visiting
Okinawa for the first time since she graduated from high school here nearly 50 years ago.
"I had my dress pulled up to my waist because my front yard was full of mud. I rode
to the dance in the back of an ambulance."
When Gregory arrived on Okinawa in 1948, three years after World War II ended, there
were only three cars on the island.
Ordering clothes through catalogs and routine power outages were warm recollections for
Gregory as she spent more than a week touring the island with 21 other Kubasaki graduates.
But it’s hardly the same Okinawa.
"You just don’t think about all this wonderful stuff being so young,"
she added. "Then, I was uninterested. My father promised me it would only be one
year. But it’s very nostalgic. I can’t get over how many cars are here, with the
traffic and the expressway. But the people of Okinawa haven’t changed. They’re
still kind and courteous people."
The trip was something many alumni talked about for years.
"In the States, in any given year, there’s three or four reunions of Kubasaki
students somewhere," said Bill Melver, one of the trip coordinators and a 1960
Kubasaki graduate. "Everybody started really taking the idea seriously when we met
last year in Las Vegas."
The returning students attended the school from 1952 through 1969. Some spent only a
year or two on the island. Some never graduated from Kubasaki High. But all returned to
rekindle memories of the island where they came of age.
"Kids today can’t drive in town until they’re 18," Melver said.
"We could drive all over the place at 16, but then, most families were single-car
families, so that was a problem."
But Melver and his friends would often hop a taxi or bus and head to the Teen Center on
Kadena Air Base, then the only place set aside for teens to gather. They would play pool
and eat burgers for 25 cents.
"The island is totally different," he said. "I can’t remember any
of this. The only thing I recognize are the large tombs along the hills."
"Being here was like being on a resort island," Melver said. "We spent a
lot of time on the beaches."
The same could be said for Larry Laurion, who attended Kubasaki High between 1955 and
1957.
"In the ’50s when I was here, it was the best place to be for an American
teen-ager," Laurion said. "We had total freedom. We had live-in maids and
gardeners, part of the U.S. effort to employ as many Okinawans as we could. There were no
chores. All we had to do was enjoy life."
Laurion said he’s shared stories of his formative years with his three children,
now grown. He said life then as high school students meant complete freedom.
"We had four grades in the school and 150 students," Laurion explained.
"We were small enough that everyone got to know everyone. We got to know the person.
There was no discrimination. We were all just kids having a great time."
Laurion said some of the strongest memories come from interacting with the Okinawans
and relearning the culture.
"The island is totally interesting to us," he said. "The people were
terrific and they still are. The kindness and gentle nature of the Okinawan was never
forgotten, and it’s been refreshing to see it’s still the same."
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