Robert Engle Smith was born in Oakland, California on April 27, 1933. He was the son of Boeing School of Aeronautics Aviator Charles Engle Smith, 25, and his farm girl wife Evelyn Rose Hughes, 18, a nursing student.
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Charles Engle Smith and Evelyn Rose Hughes |
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When Robert's father finished school in Oakland, he moved back to his home in Spokane, Washington where he worked at Felts Field. In 1936, Charles was transferred to Seattle and worked at Boeing Field. In 1937 the family moved into a beautiful home in Seattle's Lake City area. And in 1938, five years after Robert's birth, his sister, Susan Lynn was born. After 2-3 years, they moved back to Spokane, as Charles was transferred again. At the end of 1941, Robert's parents divorced. The children were tossed around to relatives until their father got them together again in Seattle in the Laurelhurst neighborhood. They spent summers at their maternal grandparents' wheat and alfalfa ranch south of Spokane in Thornton, Washington, feeding pigs, chickens and cows.
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Charles E. Smith with Son, Robert at Lake City House, Seattle |
"I remember selling lemonade to workers in the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in Lake City, then Roosevelt's job program and meeting bankers and former CEOs who tipped me as I was the only one out on the road in the hot sun and made a hit by assuring lots of ICE and SUGAR in my lemonade."
World War II was in full swing during Robert's childhood. "I remember the blue point ration book for meat and red for canned goods. Also the butcher's sign on Spokane's Main Street: 'Horsemeat 5 cents a pound.' A sticker for gas (Dad had this on his 1932 Buick), a B sticker for war work, and a C sticker (my step dad had this) for doctors on car windshields. I also remember OPA 'tokens' red and blue for food and white ration books for sugar. Times weren't so bad I guess but I got polio in the Comstock pool, but my step dad caught it in time."
Robert tells another interesting event from World War II: "We saw a Japanese balloon or two with incendiary bombs high in the sky over the city center in Spokane, but the radio told us it was Venus we saw in daylight by atmospheric reflection. No one believed it, but we kept quiet. It turned out that Japanese forces in the Aleutians were releasing them to start forest fires. No news of this was ever reported as such, so the Japanese, believing the project had failed, stopped releasing balloons." The only Allied plane he ever boarded and toured was a B-25 (like the one used for the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo after Pearl Harbor was hit) when his father hosted his 3rd grade class in Spokane. "We actually built a B-25 the students of public schools in Spokane called 'The Spokane Rangers' after our city student club 'The Spokane Rangers' song. It went like this:"
We are the Spokane Rangers
Fighting for victory
We gather scrap and paper
To make the Axis flee
As for people in the war, he knew only two. One was his mother's brother, who flew the "Hump" in the Himalayas supplying Chiang's troops as radio operator, India to Kunming. His uncle sent him Chinese silver dollars, pictures of the Taj Mahal and of himself and his Chinese girlfriends. He also sent Robert an English-Chinese G.I. phrasebook, which got him interested in Chinese, which he later studied in Taiwan.
And on the European front he states: "We had one neighbor at the beginning of World War II who was a Lt. USAAF [United States Army Air Force] pilot, Monroe Quillan, from Texas. He and his wife Shirley lived next door. He was shot down over Italy. His face touched some high tension wires, but the Italian doctors would come in every day and rip off the scabs so his face wouldn't be scarred. After the war he came to see us because the only mail he received during his captivity in World War II was my pencil-written postcard to him via the Red Cross. He was in prison near Sagan in Stalag Luft III where earlier the 'Great Escape' took place. (The 'Great Escape' was not just a movie—it really happened. Fifty of the seventy-nine escapees were shot; only three made it out of the country. Hitler ordered mostly British Royal Air Force shot.) Toward the end, they marched all the prisoners in the snow. There were forced marches all over as the Russians and Allies advanced. Monroe believed that Hitler wanted to keep the prisoners as bargaining chips. Because of his injuries, I remember he slept with one eye open. He brought me a pair of Norwegian skis with metal railings because of that postcard."
Robert also spent summers in Idaho, living with his aunt, uncle, and grandfather. When he was in the 5th grade, he worked as a paper boy. He had to collect money from customers, and bullies tried and succeeded in robbing him twice. "My grandfather lent me his Iver Johnson .32 pistol to keep the bullies at bay, and I shot the tires off the bullies' bikes while they were on them. They never bothered me again."
Robert was an altar boy at St. John's Episcopal Church in Spokane when he was 11 years old. While his friend, Tom Mott, got into trouble for stealing communion wine, Robert got busted for playing Chopsticks on the organ while it was hooked to the chimes, which rang out from Grand and 12th Avenue. "Rev. Edward Makin Cross, who built the cathedral over many years, came 'calling' to our home. But my stepfather was instrumental in transposing Wagner music for the church choir and Tom's mother had contributed to the church heavily. So we got off with a warning not to play anything but Bach or Beethoven and play it well—NEVER Chopsticks on the church bells."
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St. John's Cathedral in Spokane |
Some of Robert's fondest memories in Spokane were kayaking on Manitou Pond, rubber life rafting down Hangman's Creek, dressing in Ed Larrabee's dad's World War I French and English uniforms, and stopping the Northern Pacific freight train parallel to the creek with wooden rifles and taking off like a swift when railroad cops chased them. "Ah 12 years old...a good life nonetheless."
Robert was 8 years old when his parents divorced and 13 when his father was remarried to Freda "Duffy" Lenore Donalson, a fellow Northwest Airlines employee (radio operator) in his dad's Operations office where he worked as a Flight Control Superintendent at Boeing Field in Seattle. In his younger years, Robert was shifted around from town to town, school to school. This was partly due to his parents' divorce in 1941. He spent part of his time in Seattle, part of it in Spokane, and part of it in southern California.
In 6th grade, Robert went to Helen Bush School for Girls in a suburb of Seattle as an emergency placement. In the latter part of 6th grade, he went to Laurelhurst School in Seattle. As Robert tells the story, his family had "an Irish housekeeper who scared the bejeezus out of my sister and me with her Irish ghost stories, culminating in lightning hitting a tree across the street flying into the front door of the house next door. As Mrs. Flaherety was finishing the story, electricity from the lightning ran up and down a string connecting the pull cord and light in the basement where we were watching her do the laundry."
In late 1943 or early 1944 Robert and his sister Susan moved to a huge four-floor mansion on Spokane's south side. The house had many rooms including an entire top floor for servant's quarters, which they shared with two Japanese-American families during World War II when Robert was nine to twelve years old.
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Mansion in Spokane |
Robert and Susan's mother had remarried Robert's ear doctor. (At a young age, Robert had mastoiditis, an inflammation of the mastoid bone behind the ear, and this doctor performed the surgery. He later did some corrective surgery in Seattle and in Spokane.) Five Japanese servants from American Internment Camps were hired to work in this mansion. Robert was raised in part by a 17-year-old girl named Miya Fukuyama who later gave him work after World War II in her flower shop in Seattle. Due to the kindness of this young woman who helped raise him, Robert has always been fond of Asian people and their culture, and he later married a Japanese-American woman from Hawaii.
Robert was an active youth and took up motorbiking, mountain climbing in the Olympics, skiing in the Cascades, and at ages 14-16, life rafting the Spokane rapids during high school.
In 1948 when Robert was a sophomore at West Seattle High School, Robert's father got him a Cushman Marine Corp motorscooter and shipped it to Spokane. In exchange for the motorscooter, Robert's father took back the 1932 Buick he had given him. It was a touring car (roll-up chauffeur window with speaking tube and pull-down curtain to block off the view of the unemployed (from the Great Depression). "Dad kept getting free cars from pilots he knew. They'd buy them while stationed at Seattle's Boeing Field and when they transferred, gave them to Dad. He was so intimate with all the pilots, even through the jet age, due to their mutual 1930s aviation school like Oakland's Boeing School of Aeronautics."
Robert learned to drive a car at 15 years of age. "I learned to drive breaking in the engine on my stepfather's 1948 Pontiac, driving in spurts of 10-20-30-40-50-60-70 miles per hour. Mom gave me a parking lesson, so I passed the Washington State exam. But I had my first license in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, at age 14 where all you needed was a quarter and be tall enough to reach the cashier's window. I didn't even know how to drive but passed the eye and written exams."
In his senior year of high school, Robert was living in a room his dad built in the top of the garage at 1066 South 154th Place near the new Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) International Airport. (This address is now part of the airport's third runway.) One time, he took his girlfriend, Shirley Kaltenbach, home in his father's 1937 Buick because it was raining, despite his father's prohibition from using the car. He pulled out of the driveway so fast that he hit the corner of the garage, pulling out the corner supports and bringing it down to a 55-degree tilt in front. "Dad didn't scold me, just let me sleep at an angle with the window unfixed for the rest of the winter. I used my stepfather's ship sails to cover my bed. Snowdrifts would come in covering me and Buster [the dog] on the bed. Sure was cold in that attic, but I really appreciated his watching out for me. 'The most important thing for a child is the protection of a father,' said Sigmund Freud."
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Garage With Robert's Room Upstairs |
In June 1949, Robert drove his motorscooter all the way from Spokane to Seattle (300 miles) at 25 miles per hour with a neighbor kid and toolbox on the back. They rode through the Moses Lake desert and over the Cascade Mountains. The trip took an incredible fifteen hours on the two-gear bike. "The vibration caused my hands to cramp in driving position for three days after." But Robert loved that bike. "I would go out on the Cushman Marine Corps surplus motorscooter to the Olympic Mountains to escape the city. I'd climb mountains and play baseball with Indian pals I met at the Northwest Makah Reservation. I would go up to Appleton Peak between the Olympic Hotsprings and Soleduc Hotsprings and sleep in the snowbank. I believe I even took George Lewan [a lifetime friend] once in 1951."
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USMC Cushman |
Robert met George Lewan in 1949 through a mutual classmate, Jon "J.D." Berg, while Robert was still in high school and George was going to the University of Washington. George lived close by, so he and Robert would go skiing every winter weekend at Hyak in the Cascades. At that time, there were no ski lifts, only ropes to grab onto. Later, as an Army officer, George would have the men from his unit practice tracking by aiming at Northwest Airlines planes because Robert's father worked at Sea-Tac for NWA. Robert never told his father who was doing it.
Robert acquired a taste for classical music and an early age. Before living near Sea-Tac Airport, he lived with his father and stepmother, Duffy, stepmother's sister, Dana Deanne (D.D.) and his new baby sister, Anita Lorene (born 1946), in West Seattle at 7313 29th S.W. It was a small house, but the family managed. Robert had a room in the basement and played classical records, mostly Bach unaccompanied violin concertos, by hooking up to his stepmother's huge radio. "I drove everybody nuts, but D.D. never complained." He also kept garter snakes in aquariums under the staircase.
In the 12th grade, 1949-50, Robert took French from Miss Palmer at Highline High School. He skipped class a couple of Fridays and went with his friend, Duane Smith, to the University of Washington Music School to hear recitals of piano string quartets. One of those times, he saw his teacher, Miss Palmer, there skipping school and enjoying the recitals as well. "She was there too, with her Kleenex and sniffles. We eyeballed each other but neither said a word after. There was just a twinkle in her eye when we asked later if we could miss a Friday to see a sick friend with a bad persistent cold!"
After graduation from high school, Robert worked as a lumber worker for his uncle's lumber mill in Ventura, California for one summer. Robert sold the Cushman and bought a Harley Davidson 125 and shipped it to his uncle's house in Ventura, California. In September 1949 he rode to Pomona College in Claremont, California and attended regularly until January 1950 when he was hit on U.S. 66, Claremont to San Bernardino, by a drunk driver in the fog. He and the cycle were dragged down the highway 360 feet with Robert on the hood, which resulted in Robert having a broken back. Robert spent January through June 1951 attending classes only part time, as he was in pain much of the time. During the first semester he made B grades, but because of the accident, he only earned Ds during the second semester. "No one came to see me in 469 Clark Hall except my friend Skip Stone and Bob Porter. Lucky for me the trip from motorcycle to windshield broke my back in two places. It kept me out of the Korean War."
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Harley 125 |
In Japan he befriended a New Zealand sergeant who advised, "Keep out of this one lad; they are not letting us win this so called 'police action.'" Even General MacArthur was told he could not bomb the Chinese side of the Yalu North Korea bridge and said, "In all my military service I have never learned how to bomb HALF a bridge. In war there is no substitute for victory."
After his year at Pomona College, Robert went with classmates from Japan and Belgium to Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada, then down to Yellowstone. "They ran off with my money and clothes and the forest ranger found me in a ditch. He took me to Ed Hodgson's Chuckwagon on the Snake River near Moose, Wyoming, north of Jackson Hole. I was employed as a cook and helper on the ranch, which was on the Snake River under the Grand Tetons. I worked my butt off seven days a week using big Dutch ovens, carrying sides of beef, and even riding as an Indian (half naked) for the Big Sky movie." For Robert and his other ranch hands, Ed got $20 a day per man for his extras. "Lots of beans and damned little money as the cowboys say." Then he got enough money for a ticket to Seattle and the University of Washington after a short two-week free trip to Asia on his father's Northwest Airlines pass in 1951.
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Robert was in the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) at Pomona and also later at the University of Washington. He was kicked out for joining the IWW (International Workers of the World) an anti-lumber trust union. In those McCarthy days he felt the Army ROTC must have considered his union some branch of the Communist Party. He also failed the physical, so the Air Force ROTC denied him entry into their advanced program.
Robert was exempted from the U.S. Army with 4F status because of the accident crushing his Harley on Route 66 in Pomona College in 1950 while living with his mother in Hollywood, California. In 1951, during the war in Korea, he visited Japan on an airline pass from his father who worked as a flight dispatcher for Northwest Airlines. Robert rode on a DC-4 (C-54 Skymaster) Korean Airlift flight from Seattle to Shemya, Alaska to Tokyo, Japan. Most trips were on a regular airline flight with a pass from his father. "Every time Dad would give me a trip I got to fly 'third man' between the pilot and co-pilot from 1940 to 1966."
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Robert in Japan, Countryside, 1951 |
Speaking of DC-4s, their cruising altitude was about 7,000 feet, they were not pressurized, and it took fourteen hours to fly from Seattle to Honolulu (with a stop in Portland for refueling and picking up passengers). The flight from Seattle to Shemya to Tokyo took twenty-four hours.
In April 1951, Robert got a new baby sister, Valerie Ann, from his father's marriage to Duffy.
From September 1951 to August 1952, Robert attended the University of Washington in Seattle. Being a student deferred him from the draft, but Robert tried to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, relying on his cousin from Vancouver. "In the RCAF, which my cousin from Vancouver was in, you didn't have to swear loyalty to the King by virtue of an agreement made during the Battle of Britain. There were no RCAF troops in Korea where we delivered M.A.S.H. helicopters and brought back dead bodies of officers in boxes on NWA's Korean Airlift." However, at the Canadian border, his passport showed it was good for only three days, so he was unable to join the RCAF.
Times were tough and money was scarce in Robert's first two years at the University of Washington. In the winter of 1952 he ran out of money and could no longer stay in the veterans' barracks. Before getting his next job at Boeing Airplane Company, he lived in the heating tunnels under the university for three weeks. "I had a cot under Meany Hall Theatre. Coming out of the tunnel with a friend, we got caught by campus police who, upon inspecting our quarters and finding nothing stolen, accepted my printed confession of why I was living there."
In the summer of 1952 when Robert was finishing his second year of Far Eastern studies at the University of Washington, he was working at Meany Hotel parking lot taking parking fees. His friend, Bob Porter, whom he had met at Pomona and is still his good friend today, drove off with him on his (Bob Porter's) father's blue Plymouth. "He drove so fast I couldn't get off." Robert said he drove up and down the "Ave" (University Way NE) and had to yell to have him stop.
In September 1952 Robert took advantage of another airline pass and traveled to Honolulu. While there, he tore up the other half of his round trip ticket and stayed in Hawaii. His uncle got him a job with the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Robert then enrolled at the University of Hawaii and studied there from September 1952 to June 1953. In the autumn of 1952 he met his future wife, Pat Fujimoto, in music and Japanese classes. They were married in Honolulu in 1953 and lived for a short time with her mother, Edith Kiyok Fujimoto Tomasu and stepfather, Katashi Tomasu. Robert soon discovered it was difficult to study in such a beautiful setting as Hawaii. He found himself going to the beach more than the library. In the latter part of 1953, Robert and his new wife moved back to Seattle. Robert was only 20 years old.
After moving back to Seattle, Robert got a job as a baggageman with Northwest Airlines and later a transportation representative (working mostly on the ramp) at Sea-Tac Airport. At that time, there were no facilities for handicapped people. One time, Marilyn Monroe was returning from Banff, Canada and had broken her leg from working on the movie, River of No Return. As a ramp worker, Robert carried the movie star from a wheelchair to the Northwest DC-4 heading for Portland, Oregon. Robert recalls, "In her breathy, soft voice, she said, 'Thank you,' and she kissed me on the forehead. In those days women wore real smeary lipstick, none of that lip gloss nonsense. Boy, were the guys and supervisor mad. 'Smitty gets all the luck,' they said. My wife saw the lipstick and said, 'You're fooling around with your old girlfriend from high school. I have eyes. I can see.' I was on a bed that pushed into the wall, and Bob Porter was there when I came home at 6:00 p.m. I wanted everyone at work to see, so I didn't wash off the lipstick for a couple of days, but of course, my wife wouldn't come near me until I did."
Robert was the youngest agent at Northwest and was nicknamed "Dennis the Menace" by the other employees for asking what they thought were "dumb" questions. But he'd had two years of college and spoke Japanese, so he was able to help Japanese passengers in the line and often would get white envelopes with "tips" either in yen or dollars. He never told the other ticket agents, many of whom were rude to Japanese people because it was 1953 and only eight years after the end of World War II.
Laid off from the airline, Robert was provided a free pass for himself and his wife back to Honolulu in September of 1953. He got a job at the old Honolulu Airport (John Rodgers Field) with Transocean Airlines, which was sending DC-4s (as C-54 Skymasters) to Korea for the Korean Airlift after the Korean War. He worked on the ramp as a transportation agent for U.S. mainland tourist flights and Korean Airlift flights that were bringing back GIs and taking civilians and military personnel to Korea. Sometimes he got to help throw switches sitting in the copilot seat of the DC-4s to help bring them into the hangar. "I remember not getting paid on time and ground crew dispatchers and ticket agents racing to Hangar #5 for the box lunches the passengers and GIs couldn't eat due to turbulence. Manny and I got there first and grabbed all the chicken lunches we could for our families. With no pay we had to do something." After the Korean Airlift ended, Robert was laid off again.
In February 1954, Robert went back alone to Seattle and worked a couple of months for Alaska Airlines as a dispatch clerk. Robert was living at his father's new house at 15423 10th Ave. S., only about a block away from where he'd had the garage room in high school. There he lived in a storage area above the garage, sleeping on a cot, and riding his sister's bicycle to work at the airport. Because it was faster to take a shortcut, and he was working all night, Robert rode the bicycle down the runway. There was no security, the airport was only five years old, and there was no one to stop him from this unusual detour. "Why go to U.S. 99 and then to Sea-Tac when I could take a shortcut over the field? It was easier and was dark from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. during my shift. When Dad was on the dogwatch shift, I would walk over the field to Northwest Airlines and we'd talk. He told me to get out of airline business, so I did."
In the spring of 1954, Robert volunteered for the draft. "There were no jobs at all in Hawaii. Even my father-in-law, who was an expert mechanic, couldn't find work." Robert was sent to Schofield Barracks in Wahiawa, Hawaii for four months' basic and advanced jungle warfare training under French Foreign Legion Vietnam Legion of Honor (France) Un ONU Badge Colonel Francis Xavier Therrien. "The advanced jungle warfare training was so we could help the French in French Indo China, but when we graduated, all of us were 'blendable with Vietnamese dark' Hawaii guys, mostly Filipinos, Guamanians, Hawaiians, and Samoans, who were supposed to blend in with Vietnamese." As the French signed a peace accord in September 1954, his unit disbanded. The French divided Indo China into North and South Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.
Robert worked a year at Fort Shafter in Honolulu. Due to his two years of college and typing skills, he became the company clerk. Upon graduation from boot camp, he worked nights and weekends as an army movie projectionist for Morale Welfare at Fort DeRussy, Honolulu, Hawaii.
After some company clerk duties, and due to "a kid, Bobby Ferguson, I'd befriended on my night job, whose father was Chief of Staff, I was able to take a boat with my wife and daughter on 'morale leave' to Fort Lewis in Washington State." While at Fort Lewis, Robert was sent to Alaska for a week for winter warfare training. "We weren't allowed winter clothing because we had only four months to get out. It was the worst blizzard season they'd had in forty years."
It was difficult to find housing for Robert and his Japanese-American wife in 1956. There were no anti-racial prejudice laws related to housing at the time, and many mixed marriages were frowned upon. "My classmate at Far Eastern and Russian Institute, Dick Hirabayashi, a Japanese-American whose Caucasian wife, Dorothy Cook Hirabayashi, went house hunting with my wife and me, so landlords would think we weren't married to another race, which was a no-no then. When they found out we had mixed marriages, they refused to rent to us." Fortunately, Bob Porter's father, Robert Dickey Porter, Dean of Foreign Students at the University of Washington, found them a temporary place with an architect. When Robert tried to find housing again, he was refused. "I was so pissed I went in my U.S. Army field jacket to the Seattle mayor's office and complained. Gordon S. Clinton, Mayor of Seattle at the time, placed us in Yesler Terrace Apartments and later in the University of Washington's married housing for the University of Washington near Sandpoint Way N.E., both in Seattle."
In February 1956, Robert was discharged from the U.S. Army. On the GI Bill at the University of Washington he studied Far Eastern studies, Japanese and history. He received a teaching degree from the University of Washington in 1958, taking some graduate courses after that.
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Robert Discharged from the Army, 1956 |
By this time, Robert had a daughter, Lili Reiko, born January 8, 1954 in Honolulu, and a son, Robert "Robby" Engle Genji, born December 15, 1957 in Seattle.
Robert's first job out of college, June-August 1958, was changing tubes as an IBM management trainee at Boeing for IBM's BOMARC computer in Seattle. He worked in a huge room as big as four airplane hangars with computers one-tenth the power of an average IBM or Mac laptop. "When I quit to teach in Hawaii, the IBM security folks followed me out just to be sure I wasn't a spy for NCR [National Cash Register Company] or rival companies. IBM had worldwide security."
Robert went back to Hawaii and taught 8th grade for twelve years at Kamehameha Schools. "I took a Pan Am Clipper Stratocruiser with my family when my son was eight months old, coming back from Seattle to get the job at Kamehameha and lived for ten years on Bishop Museum Grounds in Kamehameha housing. I never got to ride on the seaplane though."
In 1959, Robert went on an archeological dig on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where he spent all summer. His group was looking for evidence of early Micronesian and/or Polynesian civilizations. While there, a hurricane hit, blowing off tin roofs all over Kauai, and the team had to hide in burial caves on the north coast of the island. After the hurricane, they found dead horses, which came ashore all over in the "valley of the lost tribe," Nualolo Kai. The carcasses were still intact, but the hurricane had decapitated their heads. "Out of food, I had the only spear gun and net and was chased off the reef by a 12-foot shark." Robert also found the missing link tattoo needle from Micronesia linking Micronesians (later menehune-manahune, which means slave in Tahitian) in 900 A.D. The only mail he received was from his wife who wrote, "Stop fooling around out there and come back and pay the bills."
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Pictures from the Nualolo Kai Valley Archeological Expedition, 1959, Kauai |
The letter from Bishop Museum's Kenneth Emory, Senior Anthropologist, attests to Robert being on the expedition.
Dear Robert,
Indeed I can say you were with me in the field on Kauai in 1959 and to prove it is a picture on page 36 in Polynesian Cultural History published by the museum in 1967.
Your letter came during my European tour and was buried under correspondence to be answered. It may be too late to send this to the Army Education Committee and if so let me know and I will get a letter off to them pronto.
Kenneth Emory
Senior Anthropologist
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Letter from Kenneth Emory |
In 1960, Robert received a mathematics grant in San Francisco. On the cruise across the Pacific on the American President Lines SS President Wilson, he met another lifelong friend, Peter Bechtold and his wife, Aiko. "Aiko went to school in Oakland and Peter stayed in my dorm. He had just finished walking across Asia from New York and Europe, six months hitchhiking across Turkey having to help his driver in smuggling watches through Iran and Afghanistan into India where he took a French ship to Saigon and Yokohama. All the folks including my Arab roommate from Khartoum smuggled him food from the student cafeteria, and I lent him my Uncle Bob's suit so he could get a job in a bank near Aiko's school in Oakland. He was 20, and I was 27."
In June 1964, after six years of teaching at Kamehameha, Robert was given a one-year sabbatical in Taiwan. On arrival in Taiwan, he taught English to Chinese English teachers. He also earned his tuition one-on-one in exchange at the Taiwan Provincial Normal University using the Texas-Taiwan method of using tones in syllables. He learned conversation for four months, five days a week, three hours a day. He then went on to cover the material in the elementary schools, kindergarten through 4th grade characters. Additionally, he was tutored two hours at night on drills on these characters.
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Taiwan Card |
This went on until June 1965 when he came back to Honolulu and enrolled nights with Mrs. Lum (Lin) at the United Chinese Press in an adult class of Cantonese and English speaking persons to continue Mandarin. In the summer of 1967, he went back to Taiwan for another three months' conversation one-on-one continuation of Mandarin (Guo-Yu) on a summer grant from Kamehameha. Robert got a near lethal variety of influenza late in July 1967 in Taiwan and en route to Hawaii via Hong Kong. He was taken to St. Elizabeth's hospital where he was treated through a friend, Chiu Lai Lung of the Hong Kong Police Reserve. He got a place to stay for three weeks and recovered. "I am eternally grateful for this. Because of the ship's repair delay and Chiu Lai Lung's assistance and kindness, I was able to return to Taiwan in August, although Hong Kong was at that time under siege of Red Guards locally and Communist China was shutting off Hong Kong's water supply except on Thursdays."
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Kamehameha Collage |
In the fall and winter following all this, he taught night school at the Kailua Community School for Adults under the Department of Education, Mandarin to Cantonese speakers using the Chinese phonetic symbol system as taught in the elementary schools.
Robert loved collecting historical souvenirs and other memorabilia. He was an unconventional teacher, but his students loved him. He tells this story from 1966:
Once I was with some students down at the airport trying to bum some aircraft instruments for a six-foot long woodcraft plane we were making in class for our World War I history unit. Jim Fleming of Fleming Air Service Transport had a twin engine Beechcraft without a tail he said he would give us.
I fixed it up and hauled it using my white VW Microbus, which had red curtains and Chinese restaurant lanterns and Japanese Tatami mats on the floor. All rear seats were removed for maximum room. The tail of the Beechcraft fit in the rear of the VW Microbus, and it was tied down with airplane control cables. I used the red curtains to hang on the plane's wings, which had been shortened to the engine mounts (engines removed too) so I could follow the "wide load" procedures the police gave me then. Even then, the VW bus had room for six students who came with me.
I really didn't think I could drag it five miles home down the highway but gave it a try. When I was stopped by a police cruiser and motorcycle, I found out they were graduates of the school where I taught, and they gave me a police escort to my rented house.
The six students were thrilled of course (Go Mr.Smith, GO!) but it wouldn't fit in the driveway where I also had a Japanese heavy machine gun and barber chair overlooking the harbor and airport. So I called the school's principal, a very moody 45-year-old woman from Bristol, England, who happened to be sick and referred the call to Central Messaging. The PRESIDENT of the SCHOOL (Kamehameha) thought it was a good idea and called for a tow truck to take the ten-passenger twin engine Beechcraft derelict to school. Unfortunately, the plane was not taken to my classroom but to the carpenters' PARKING SPACE next to High School Voc-Tech, who had a cow when they saw they had no place to park. After that, I was kind of on the outs with the principal. Having experienced the Blitz in 1940, she said, "Bob, you can't bring a BOMBER up here."
End result: My contract was renewed for three more years but not without prejudice. The tow truck hauled the plane back to the airport.
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Beechcraft Airplane and VW Van Collage |
While living in Hawaii on Hanai Loop, 1967-1969, Robert gave neighborhood boys haircuts from an old antique barber chair. A student's dad had heard of Robert's interest in World War II souvenir weapons, so he gave him a heavy Japanese machine gun and a barber chair. Robert's landlord loved to sit in the chair, overlooking the harbor and airport, and smoke cigars. His two sons would take haircuts along with Robert's son.
At that time, Robert's salary from Kamehameha was not very much. So he and his friend, Everett Frye, got neighbors to bring their old stuff to a swap meet at a drive-in theater every weekend. Robert was able to obtain a lot of metal ammo boxes left over from his jungle training in the Army. He and Everett hired neighborhood kids to clean up the boxes then sold them as toolboxes for $3.00 each. "When business was slow, I would yell out, 'Get your metal toolboxes, all you can carry, for $5.00.' A guy with one leg and a crutch managed to carry off eight, with two stuck in between his legs."
When they ran out of junk to sell, Robert and Everett would go to all the open garages in Kaimuki on Saturdays and offer to clean garages in exchange for the junk. They got quite a few tools and even some golf clubs to sell. Robert recalls, "Of course, when the man of the house returned with an empty clean garage, he would go bonkers to his wife: 'You did WHAT? Gave all my good stuff away to a garage cleaner guy!!' But we made quite a bit selling that junk at discount, way below used tool prices."
In June 1969, Robert took his family on a cruise from Vancouver to Europe. They traveled via Panama and Trinidad off Venezuela. Once in Europe, Robert's daughter, 15 years old, with an International driver's license, drove their Volkswagen station wagon into France, Belgium (Bastogne), Luxembourg, and Heidelberg, Germany. Then they traveled down to Basel, Switzerland and then to Zermall, Matterhorn then to Vaduz, Lichtenstein and Austria. Afterwards, they went on to King Ludwig's Castle at Neuschwanstein and then to Munich, Germany where their daughter, who at McKinley High School in Hawaii, was one of the beauty queens, became an instant hit at the Hofbrauhaus with her hula dancing. At that time, there were no age limits for the Hofbrauhaus, the most famous beer hall in the Western world. Robert then went alone to Berlin on Pan American Airways (escorted by Communist jet fighters), while the rest of the family flew back to Los Angeles over Greenland. Then Robert flew to Paris on Air France, then to Seattle on Northwest Airlines, then on to Los Angeles where he had a new job teaching 5th grade in the autumn of 1970.
Robert became an education counselor for the U.S. Army (taking his son to Okinawa for Robert's training in 1972-1973). Robert then went to Thailand for a year, 1973-1974, for his first regular Army Education Counselor job. He worked next to the Thai Naval Base on the Gulf of Siam. One of his good friends today, Steve Carr, was a 24-year-old soldier and next door neighbor in the village of Sattahip.
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U.S. Army Support Award, Thailand |
In 1974, Robert was promoted to Education Specialist for Training at the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. He received his Masters in Education in 1975.
Robert and his family spent three years in Georgia after which Robert was reassigned to Korea for sixteen years. Robert's family flew back to Hawaii ahead of him. In 1977 when Robert was driving his 1970 Volkswagen "bug" from Georgia to Seattle, he picked up a student from Northern Arizona University. After twelve hours, Robert asked the student, Mike, who had been sleeping all through Wyoming and Idaho, to drive. Mike drove in Oregon but fell asleep. Luckily the car Robert had was a VW Beetle. At 2 a.m., the car rolled eight times down the roadside to the edge of the Columbia River, smoking not burning, with all the glass on the windows and windshield gone. Mike was dazed and in shock but not hurt. Robert was stuck inside while Mike flagged down a trucker for a ride. "Gee, I hope the owner of the car I wrecked is okay," Mike told the trucker, who radioed for an ambulance on his CB. So Robert was taken to a hospital eighty miles from The Dalles, Oregon, where the auricular (AC) separation in his arm was repaired by a newly discharged Navy surgeon. Then his father and sister, Susan, drove from Seattle to pick him up. "My arm was sore for a whole year during my first year of work in Korea. I could have taken Workman's Comp but didn't know it."
Despite his injuries, Robert felt he would have no job if not proceeding to Korea despite severe traumatic injury. He was probably still in shock when he arrived a few miles at the Demilitarized Zone North of Seoul, Korea. He spent the next year sort of in shock at a hotel outside Tongduchon mostly in bed when not working fourteen hours a day. Finally, in 1979 he'd had enough and petitoned for a post down South in Waegwan where he was not required to work so many hours. He went on to work in Korea 1977-1995 with two one-year breaks when civilians were required to go back to the USA every five years for a year. The first of the one-year breaks was in 1984-1985; the second one-year break was in 1990-1991. Both times he served at Fort Ord in Monterrey, California.
An interesting story about Army Specialist Steve Carr is depicted here. Robert met Steve in Thailand in 1973 when Robert provided him education counseling. Steve asked Robert how he could get an "easy job" like his, just sitting behind a desk talking to GIs. Robert told him he needed a Master's degree among other things. Steve taunted him, telling him he'd do it and come back and be Robert's boss. In 1993, that's exactly what happened in Korea. Steve got two Master's degrees and became Robert's boss. True story.
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"Does a Degree Pay Off?" Poster |
Robert served in a 4077 M.A.S.H. unit from 1979 to 1984 at Camp Humphreys, 55 miles south of Seoul where another boss drove him to eat so much he went from 200 to 304 pounds in the nine-month winters in Korea with little leave time. At this point, the flight surgeon got him running and jogging. Robert ran six then twelve miles daily, and sometimes twenty-six miles on weekends. He was all muscle but still 225 pounds. He was given a standing ovation when he completed fourteen Nautilus machines, 20 lbs. to 180 lbs.
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Finally, he transferred south to Taegu then later to Pusan/Cheju-Do (1987-90). In Taegu his bike pedal and mirror was sideswiped by a waste disposal truck that very nearly took his foot. In 1989 he regained his weight to 300 pounds and applied for a gastric bypass, which was endorsed by the 400-pound very good boss who was curious to see what it would do. He went to Hawaii for this operation and returned four months later at 210 pounds, one-third his body weight.
Upon his return to Korea, he transferred south to Pusan Racetrack Army Center for Port workers. He was first burglarized by a leper (lepers have no eyebrows) gang leader of 18- and 19-year-olds. His beloved companion puppy, Brown Mouse, a dachshund that had been with him for four years, was stolen too. He returned home late, and set out in the kitchen were all the knives the burglars left out in case he returned while they stole everything. He was compensated by the Army though.
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Robert at Camp Howze in Korea, 1994 |
The next of a near miss in his nine proverbial lives came when he swallowed an almond without chewing it and it plugged up the hole in his esophagus so he could not even drink water. He became dehydrated to the point where in a week he was emergency medically evacuated to Hawaii where surgeons removed it. He then went back to California to his U.S. mainland assignment another year which civilians after five years must do to "cleanse their records from whatever corrupt schemes Reagan figured civil servants overseas must have."
In 1991 Robert applied for any counselor job overseas and was immediately accepted for Korea, knowing conditions there and somewhat having mastered the language from living there and from University of Maryland Far East courses.
The following lists Robert's service in Korea:
Eventually at 60 years of age, Robert Engle Smith received the highest award the United States Army can give: Volunteering moving furniture and a "window" at Camp Howze from former Thailand Project Transmission Spec4 and current sponsor, Steven Wayne Carr.
"I retired in 1995 when the big do-nothing boss in Seoul eliminated all the counselors from the DMZ area." The timing of his retirement was right, as his wife was ailing and he was able to go home and take care of her until she passed away in 2001.
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Moving Furniture Award |
Robert found a number of ways to cope while living in Korea. His sister mailed him videotapes of shows and movies she recorded from television in Seattle. Robert would lend the tapes to GIs who would watch the shows as well as the commercials because they reminded them of home. He was also allowed to visit home (Hawaii) every six months. He would fly from Seoul to Hickam Air Force Base on a military plane, often a C-5A Galaxy sitting between two tanks. He also had the satisfaction of helping numerous GIs pursue their education while in the Army. Some of them were training to be paratroopers but were afraid to jump out of an airplane. Among many of Robert's posters was one he made with a picture of his sister hanging off the strut of a Cessna wearing a parachute. "If my kid sister can do it, so can you," the poster said.
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Robert's Sister, Anita, Parachuting, 1984 |
Robert has been a collector of military memorabilia for many years. He collects uniforms, hats, model airplanes and tanks, maps, toy soldiers, metals and patches. He has made numerous dioramas depicting historical events, has sold his collections several times and collected them again. Some of his collections are depicted below:
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Robert's Collections |
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On October 25, 2001, Robert married Paz Agravante Balansag of Butuan Agusan del Norte Northern Mindanao, the southern most island of the Philippines. He married as a widower only five months after his Hawaii-Japanese wife of forty-eight years died in May 2001. At that time, the U.S. was assisting the Philippine Army in nearby Basilan to find Abu Sayaf, al-Qaeda-linked guerrillas who had kidnapped tourists for ransom. Robert moved back to Honolulu with Paz and her then 3-year-old daughter, Faith on December 5, 2002. This was after after a year living in the Mountain town of Baguio, Luzon. His sister Anita from Seattle joined them in Hawaii in January 2003, staying until September of that year.
Paz now works as a dental assistant with the State of Hawaii, while Faith is learning piano, clarinet, and violin. Robert continues to enjoy his retirement and his new family.
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Robert E. Smith Life Combo Collage |
