Janet Kahaunani Bal’s reminiscences of Kauai during the 1940s and 1950s

The daughter of Jimmie and Mary Bal, Janet Kahaunani Bal Landfried was born in Lihu‘e in 1941, raised in Kekaha during the 1940s and 1950s, and attended Waimea High and Elementary School from kindergarten through graduation in 1959.

In 1942, during World War II, her father was employed by the Army Corps of Engineers building coastal defenses around Kaua‘i.

Kahaunani recalled that he strung barbed wire on beaches, and worked on constructing ammunition tunnels between Hanalei and Kilauea and at Mana, a radar station at Kilauea on Crater Hill, and pill boxes at intervals inland of beaches.

A year later, in 1943, Kekaha Sugar Co. hired him as camp policeman, and he retired after 34 years with the plantation as housing administrator, while her mother was employed as a teacher at Kekaha and Waimea schools.

With her father’s job came a nice supervisor’s house at a rent of only $27 a month in 1946, which still stands to this day on the road to Koke‘e.

Even better housing for department heads was located on “King’s Row.”

Yet, most plantation laborers and their families — comprised of Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Canadians, Germans, Norwegians and Hawaiians — lived in small houses built of unfinished lumber in camps such as Hawaiian Camp, Spanish Camp, Filipino Camp and Mill Camp, while the “Bull Pen” and the “Boarding House” housed single male, mostly-Filipino workers.

In those days, the main buildings in Kekaha were the mill, a theater, a few stores, two gas stations and the post office, while next to the elementary school was H.P. Faye Park, with the only running track on the island for many years.

For fun, Kahaunani, her sister, brother and her friends often played in irrigation ditches, caught fish and crawfish and swam in the Lindsay A. Faye Swimming Pool.

One of the very special times for Kekaha Sugar Co. kids was Christmas, when each plantation kid received a brown paper bag with an apple, an orange, a handful of nuts, and some hard Christmas candy from the plantation.