It is a common fantasy — to get the old team back together after years, after decades, and go out there one last time. That wish usually stays safely tucked away alongside the memories of glory days.
On Monday a group of ladies marched in the Pearl Harbor Memorial Parade, twirling their batons along the one mile from Fort DeRussy to the Waikiki Shell. They hadn’t performed in more than 40 years. Their families came to support them along the parade route. One has eight children. That’s nothing, another counters; she has nine grandchildren, all from the same daughter. The ladies are over 60. “But not me,” says Vannessa Keohokapu Dela Cruz. “I am only 60 years old, so don’t say I’m ‘over.’” There’s lots of joking and teasing, but when they’re in formation and team captain Madonna Keohokapu-Meria blows the whistle, they’re poised and polished, knees high and batons glinting, and as good as they ever were.
From 1967 to 1974 the girls from Castle High School known as the Castle Queens Majorettes twirled their batons in parades and shows all over the state. They were elegant and perfectly coiffed, and could throw a baton way over their heads and catch it behind their backs. They were trained to model clothing and had lessons in etiquette. They were at the pinnacle of teenage perfection for that era.
In December 2014, coach Janet Kalus Cummins and her husband, retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Tom Cummins, were visiting Hawaii from their home in Bozeman, Mont. She had been dreaming about the Queens for years, and in those dreams she was always getting them ready for a big performance. Cummins decided to look for some of her former students. “I figured someone had to have kept her maiden name,” she said.
She first found Dela Cruz, Castle class of 1973.
“I called her up and said, ‘This is Coach!’ And she said, ‘Nah. It’s not.’ And I said, ‘We need a reunion!’”
A day and a half later, a group of nearly a dozen former Castle Queens, including the three Keohokapu sisters, met with Cummins for lunch at the Hale Koa Hotel. They laughed for eight hours straight. “I knew who everybody was. I remembered every name,” Cummins, 69, said. “As they came in, I saw their teenage faces even though I was meeting them for the first time as women.”
Shortly afterward two more former Queens were located, so they had another reunion. They brought old photos and scrapbooks filled with pictures of themselves as lithe teen girls in tiny sequined shorts. The conversation eventually reached that movie moment that never really happens in real life, but this time it actually did.
Meria put up her arms and said, “Let’s do the dream. Let’s march one more time!”
Cummins said, “You’re on.”
That was last year, and they’ve been practicing ever since, sometimes twice a week. They met in parks and parking lots all over the island. Cummins sent them DVDs to study, and video clips of her choreography. She texted them every day. She ordered their costumes online. She kept dreaming about them. They were always her favorites.
Cummins was a 22-year-old military wife pregnant with her first child when she started coaching the Castle High girls. She had been twirling since she was little and had coached many other teams. She was driving past the high school one day and saw the girls practicing outside. Her husband was about to be sent to Vietnam with the Marines, and she thought she should find something to occupy her time while he was gone.
She stopped her car and went to meet the girls. They didn’t have a coach and thought Cummins was pretty, so they gave her a chance. Though she charged other teams for lessons, she coached the Castle girls for free.
The first thing she did was change their name. Before her they were called the Castle Majorettes. Cummins said, “No, you are Queens.”
She also changed their costumes, going from long skirts and heavy boots to shorts and tiaras, and instituted a twirling style that included more aerial tricks.
“She was sharp,” said Doreen Domingo Lono. “Before her we weren’t sharp.”
It wasn’t an easy transition. Crystal Dias remembers that the girls who were already on the squad had to audition to be a Queen. “We were upset,” she said. But Cummins kept showing up, and the girls liked the new challenges and enjoyed feeling like stars. Cummins made sure they were noticed.
“She wasn’t just our coach; she was our promoter,” Marvelyn Baker said.
When Cummins’ husband was transferred to another post in 1974, she said goodbye to the Queens. Eventually the Castle majorette program went the way of all other high school baton squads on the island.
On Sunday morning six of the former Castle Queens Majorettes met at the Bellows Beach cabins, where Cummins is staying, for the last practice before their big performance. They were in full costume: black capri leggings, modest black tunics that each had adorned with sewn-on sequined trim, full makeup including false lashes, and tiaras pinned onto curled, glamour-girl hairpieces like the ones they wore in the 1970s. They marched back and forth in the sun while one of their granddaughters shot video on her phone and their coach yelled out the counts. “Ho, drill mastah,” one complained under her breath, and then started to laugh and took it back: “Nah nah nah.”
On cue, the batons flew up into the air, seemed to float for a second and then came down perfectly in each Queen’s hand.
“There’s nothing better than the feeling of doing something you didn’t know you could do,” Cummins said, “but this is doing something you didn’t know you could do again.”
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
