On the last Sunday in August, the evening sun illuminated a folding chair in its usual spot on a front lawn. But Lou Rosof wasn’t there. His chair was covered in flowers. He had died at home late Friday night, at age 88.
Lou’s sidewalk lineup of chairs, populated with regulars just like a lineup of surfers in the sea, was a fixture of the neighborhood. He was our hearth god of summer: Tall and broad-shouldered, with tumultuous foam-white hair, he reveled in the warm Hawaiian sea.
I’d see him taking his daily swim in the Tonggs channel, or commandeering the sidewalk — flanked by daughter Penny, son-in-law Troy and a chorus of neighbors — when I jogged past his house in the evenings after work. He’d raise his glass and hail me with a joyful cry. Lou made you feel like somebody.
“Come sit and have some wine!” he’d shout.
“Thanks! Another time,” I’d say without breaking my stride.
Waving me on, Lou never made me feel guilty for not stopping to chat. He’d watched me rushing back and forth for decades.
“What are you running from?” he’d sometimes ask.
But this summer, on a rare evening when he sat there alone, I stopped and kissed him on the cheek. Then Lou and I caught up as we did every few months, about our families.
I MET Lou and his children at the beach when they moved to the neighborhood in 1970. When his son Nugy and my brother Ethan started surfing at Tonggs, Lou started boogie boarding to safeguard them. He enjoyed it for years until a surfboard struck him, breaking his leg.
Recently, when he saw me in a cast after knee surgery, Lou recalled that, thanks to his broken leg, he became good friends with our shy neighbor Harrison Thurston, who had broken his foot on the reef while setting fishing nets in his outrigger canoe. Their casts propped high and dry, they would sit in Harrison’s waterfront yard talking story and drinking beer as the waves struck the sea wall, occasionally raising binoculars to check on us kids in the surf.
Although you wouldn’t know it from their carefree, barefoot demeanor, bare-chested in swim shorts, Harrison was an attorney and Lou was a labor arbitrator.
ON THE eve of Labor Day, I joined the lineup on Lou’s lawn, where Penny, Troy and others sat and remembered him with sadness, love and laughter.
Later I thought of my grandfather, Peepaw, who once worked in Dole’s Wahiawa pineapple fields. Pineapple plantation laborers didn’t win the right to collective bargaining until 1945, and even then, the conditions under which they worked, bending over with short-handled hoes, caused many painfully deformed backs. Peepaw quit the plantation and invented a machine that rolled over the fields with workers seated on board; the planting mulch scrolled past them at waist level on a conveyor belt. They inserted the young plants in the mulch (“For this delicate task, you need the human hand,” Peepaw said, noting that robotic hands had failed). The machine then lowered the embedded slips into troughs it had dug and spread dirt around them.
Labor was cheap, though, and the company didn’t buy his machine — it waited until his patent expired and built a copy. Meanwhile, Peepaw and my grandmother acquired Halm’s Kim Chee, and we kids earned money by helping out in the kim chee shop after school and on vacations. When inspectors paid visits we hid, being illegal child labor. Once, in a rush, Peepaw put us in the walk-in fridge and forgot us. There was no handle on the inside of the steel door, which silenced our pounding and cries; we were nearly frozen by the time a worker opened the door and screamed.
LIKE LOU and Harrison, Peepaw loved the sea.
When I swim out past the reef I remember how, 20 years ago, we scattered his ashes from Harrison’s canoe. Harrison was there to say goodbye. So, of course, was Lou.
The neighborhood feels lonely now our kupuna are gone, the salt air empty of their welcoming voices.
I guess it’s our turn to fill the gap.
“In the Lineup” features Hawaii’s oceangoers and their regular hangouts, from the beach to the deep blue sea. Reach Mindy Pennybacker at mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.
