All the Love in the World

Grandfather Park left the mountains of central Korea for the sugarcane fields of Oʻahu to work as a common laborer, sailing for two weeks across the Pacific Ocean on the America Maru. After his contract year was over, having proven to be a hard worker and a natural leader, probably due to his height and large frame, he stayed on at the plantation, leading crews to repair the water systems in the vast fields of the ‘Ewa plains. After learning to drive a truck, he drove crews to the various work sites in progress around the plantation. Reliable, he was promoted to better paying jobs, first at the plantation warehouse where he was in charge of delivering and returning equipment to and from the fields, and later, transferring provisions to the company stores in ‘Ewa and Waipahu from the piers in Honolulu. By the time he married, he had been a bachelor for eighteen years, working like a miner, spending most of his time underground, directing crews in excavating the deeper layers of rock beneath the softer volcanic surfaces which had to be broken into manageable sizes and then carted away before the land could be used. There was always the threat of collapse as the men worked in the tunnels they had dug long after the sun went down, working to exhaustion by the light of kerosene lamps.

Moving out of the shadows of thankless anonymity, he felt he had attained a level of respectability when he secured one of the concession rights to run a tailor shop and a laundry service at Schofield Barracks for the 13th Field Artillery Division. He never saw the job as menial. In fact, he felt as if he himself had joined the military, and having done so, attained a kind of promotion. To provide the soldiers of his adopted country with clean, neatly pressed uniforms was a thoroughly respectable business. Even at the beginning when he and his young wife were just starting out, he felt a deep sense of honor in the early mornings, scrubbing the clothes with a tub and washboard on the stream banks near the barracks. They wrung the clothes by hand. The starch his wife had concocted was applied over the clothes, which were then wrung once more and spread on the surrounding bushes to dry. After lunch, whether or not the clothes were dry, they were taken to the shop to be pressed with coal-heated irons. Soon he was able to buy his wife a sewing machine, and with that she was able to increase their profits by sewing caps and ties for the soldiers and offering alteration services not only for the soldiers but for their wives as well. Grandfather Park’s reputation grew for swift delivery of the impeccable creases and the brightest whites. At great cost to his wife’s health, Grandfather Park was one of the first practitioners of 24-hour service.