I love my neighbors all the time, especially during coronavirus
by Peter Rosegg | June 3, 2020
Working from home, I appreciate my neighbors more than ever. They are quiet and never complain. They are residents of Oahu Cemetery.
If you live near a cemetery, take advantage of it. If not, come visit mine. You will find only occasional dog walkers, runners and even skateboarders. With luck, you may hear a Scottish bag piper practicing “Amazing Grace.” Roads through most cemeteries are about one car wide, perfect for walking with one person on each side, just over six feet apart.
My cemetery is a historical treasure. Many graves hold famous or not famous people who have given their names to Honolulu streets and buildings. One of my favorites is the grave of Dr. Hugo Stangenwald, a physician and photographer who arrived from Austria in the 1850s. The building named for him at 119 Merchant Street was the city’s first “high-rise” office building with one of the earliest electric elevators when it was built in 1901. Designed by architect C.W. Dickey, it was advertised as fireproof, a selling point after the Chinatown fire the year before.
Another famous grave is the tomb on Alexander Joy Cartwright, Honolulu’s first fire chief and the “founder,” or at least codifier of the rules, of baseball. All year round, but especially on his birthday, balls, bats, caps and mitts left by grateful fans adorn his grave.
Perhaps the most internationally famous person in O ‘ahu Cemetery is Joseph Campbell, professor of literature and a philosopher known for his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he shows how world cultures are united by a typical hero. He was married to Jean Erdman, famous in her own right as a modern dancer and member of influential Dillingham family. Look for the big white marble frieze and plumeria trees of the Dillingham plot.
I could go on about the Kahanamoku grave and the Ii family plot, and even the recently erected gravestone of Thurston Twigg-Smith, my first boss, long-time publisher of The Honolulu Advertiser his family owned and a great collector of modern art. In the future, if you are lucky, I’ll tell you about Alonzo Gartley, also in my cemetery, the first general manager of Hawaiian Electric.
One way to appreciate Oahu Cemetery is the Mission Houses’ Cemetery Pupu Theatre each summer when five actors in costume stand near a grave to act out that person’s role in Hawai‘i history. Bravely — optimistically — Mission Houses is selling ticket to this year’s show, “Woman’s Triumph: 100 years of Women’s Suffrage,” scheduled for June 12 and 13, 19 and 20, 26 and 27. Learn more at https://www.missionhouses.org/calendar/.
Peter Rosegg is a senior corporate relations specialist at Hawaiian Electric Company.
