My wife, Ginger Beralas Soboleski, was born on Kauai in 1949 and raised on Kauai.
During the 1950s, she walked to Lihue Grammar School in Pualoke from her home at Lihue Camp-A via the old Tip Top Building, located where the Lihue Civic Center now stands, through sugar mill property, uphill into Lihue Cemetery, and on to school.
Also, as a kid, she and her family spent Easter Sundays at Kalapaki, where no hotel had yet been built.
There was only the beach, the stream, and the ironwood trees.
Ginger also went oopu fishing with her family upstream of the Hanalei and Wainiha rivers, and ocean fishing and diving at Haena.
Deep Pond, located by Lihue Plantation Field #31, about a mile upriver of Wailua Falls, was another place where she and her family would fish and picnic.
Near her Grandma Rita Sadang’s house at Kapaa Stable Camp was a plantation reservoir where Ginger went frogging with her cousins Warren and Donald Ditch, her brother, Allan, Grandma Rita, and her parents.
She would also accompany Grandma Rita to repair lauhala mats in Lihue Plantation manager Keith Tester’s house at Koamalu, which remains next to Aloha Church.
Likewise, she and her cousin, Camelia Ditch, would help Ginger’s mother, Julie, pick up laundry from Filipino plantation workers in Kealia Camp, launder it, and return it.
Later, during the summer of 1966, while attending Kauai High School, Ginger worked at the Hawaiian Fruit Packers cannery on Kawaihau Rd. in Kapahi to earn college money.
Ginger also rode the Waipahee Slide on Kealia Stream with her girlfriends.
Nearby, she would pick white gingers and affix them to her hair.
Then she and her girlfriends would stroll to the slide, where tourists would hear their laughter and watch them speed down the slide, splash into the pool, and swim.
One Sunday morning in 1955, she had great fun riding in a sugarcane car pulled by a locomotive along railroad tracks from the Lihue Mill to Marine Camp, Wailua, and back with her father, Lihue Plantation employee Al Beralas, and other passengers.
