A Little Bit of Hawaii Comes to Levittown: Miss Miyamoto
A teacher from Hawaii was an exciting and exotic learning experience for me.
Miss Miyamoto
I can’t tell you what arithmetic I learned in third grade at John Fitch School in Levittown. I can’t tell you a thing about the science or history curriculum either. What I can tell you, however, is that in third grade I learned the Hula.
Third grade was a truly remarkable school year for me and my classmates. Our teacher was Miss Samiko Miyamoto. Miss Miyamoto traveled all the way from the Big Island in Hawaii to teach in Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1955. A graduate of the University of Hawaii, she taught in Hawaii for two years before setting off for adventures on the east coast of the United States.
Her brother, Stanley, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, had taken up residence with his family on Blueridge Drive in Levittown. No doubt his presence attracted Miss Miyamoto to the area. My classmates and I were extremely lucky it did.
Like many people born in Hawaii, Miss Miyamoto was of Japanese ancestry. I am pretty sure that she was the first Japanese person I had ever met in my then nine years on the planet. Being in her presence daily felt quite foreign to me and more than a little exotic. Fortunately, I was young enough that my head had not been filled with Japanese stereotypes from the movies made during World War II.
To help us know a little bit about her, Miss Miyamoto would spend some time most days explaining aspects of Hawaiian history, culture, and geography.
This is how I came to learn to do the Hula. As Miss Miyamoto explained to us, the Hula was a traditional Hawaiian dance that told a story. When she demonstrated the sinuous movements of the dance, all swaying hips and waving hands, I can guarantee you that every kid in that classroom was held in rapt attention. As she danced, Miss Miyamoto would tell the story of a fishing expedition or Hawaiian folk tale. The stories, she told us, were a way to preserve Hawaiian heritage in the face of change that came in the form of settlers from all over the world with the discovery of the islands by Captain James Cook in 1778.
When she invited us all to stand up and try the dance, the murmurs and giggles soon turned to very serious attempts to somewhat emulate the swaying hips and undulating arm and hand movements she showed us. I am afraid my attempts, while sincere, were terribly wooden and feeble, but not for lack of enthusiasm. At some point everyone in the class donned a cellophane “grass” skirt and gave the Hula a try. It was fun and lightened the boredom of our regular lessons.
Miss Miyamoto also taught us about Hawaiian foods. In particular, she taught us to make the Hawaiian staple, poi. Poi is a paste made from mashing the root of the taro plant. Miss Miyamoto explained that it was sort of like mashed potatoes. She showed us how to make it by mixing the taro pulp with water and then mashing it on a board with a wooden pestle. We all took our turn in mashing the poi, which was the consistency of mashed potatoes, but faintly purple and a little sweet to the taste. We all thought it was cool that Hawaiian’s traditionally ate poi with their fingers. And we all enthusiastically dug our fingers in to give it a try.
Miss Miyamoto also taught us a bit of the geography of Hawaii, which in 1955 was not yet a state, but a territory of the United States like Puerto Rico is today. Most interesting, of course, to a nine-year-old boy were the volcanoes. Miss Miyamoto was from the Big Island of Hawaii, which was home to six volcanoes, including two of the most active in the world, Kilaeua and Mauna Lao. During the year that I was in Miss Miyamoto’s class, Kilaeua erupted, as it had done for three years in a row. During this time Moana Lao was dormant. I was fascinated by pictures of lava flowing down mountainsides, threatening Hawaiian villages just as Mt. Vesuvius had threatened Pompeii thousands of years ago.
I really enjoyed learning the geography of Hawaii and marveled that one territory could be made up of so many islands. A lifelong interest in the history, culture and geography of the islands was born in that class.
Miss Miyamoto was young, inexperienced, and soft-spoken. These characteristics were often at odds with a bunch of noisy rammy nine-year-old kids. On top of this Miss Miyamoto was given a nearly impossible classroom situation. Because Levittown was growing so quickly even a brand-new school like John Fitch was overcrowded. This meant that two third grade classrooms had to be hastily constructed in the cafeteria. Temporary dividing walls on wheels were brought in to separate the two classrooms. The dividing walls did not reach all the way to the ceiling, leaving about a two-foot gap. This meant, of course, that the rooms were far from soundproof and noisy activity in one room could disturb quiet work in the other room.
Along with a few other of my more enterprising male classmates, I discovered another use for the gap at the top of the room dividers. With the simple tool of a wooden ruler and the edge of my desk, I could create a catapult that would launch a chunk of broken crayon, balanced on one edge of the ruler, into the adjacent room causing untold havoc next door.
The trick was to bring the edge of your hand down swiftly on one end of the ruler that hung about six inches over the edge of the desk, so that the crayon flew over the divider and into the other room. It was tricky, just the right amount of force was necessary. Too much force and the projectile hit the ceiling in your own room leaving incriminating evidence on the floor. Too little force and the crayon simply hit the dividing wall leaving a telltale mark.
Of course, the other goal was to not get caught and as long as the crayon made it over the divider, no one could tell where it had come from. I managed to avoid detection more often than not. When I finally got caught, Miss Miyamoto wasn’t so much angry as hurt that I would do such a thing. Once Mrs. Coburn, the next-door teacher, got wind of my malfeasance, however, she stormed into Miss Miyamoto’s room with a vengeance and yelled at our whole class. A few of us were forced to fess up and we missed recess for a week. Mostly, I felt bad that I had gotten Miss Miyamoto in trouble with a colleague, but the temptation of this particular recreation was too much for me to overcome and I continued to miss the occasional recess when one of my missiles landed too conspicuously in Mrs. Coburn’s room.
Miss Miyamoto was skilled at all kinds of entertainment, especially music and dance, and one highlight of the third-grade year for all of us was pageant put on at the Delhaas High School auditorium. Third graders from all over the district participated. We dressed up as hobby horses, a merry-go-round, and a train caboose and danced and sang for an audience of our parents and grandparents. Miss Miyamoto designed many of the costumes for that show.
A Scene from the Pageant
Miss Miyamoto was only at John Fitch School for one year. Over the years I wondered where she had gone and what became of her. More recently through the miracle of the internet I have been able to find out a bit. After her year at Fitch, Miss Miyamoto spent a year teaching in Yonkers, New York before moving to California where she married Hiroshi Kushida, an engineer with the City of Los Angeles. Miss Miyamoto taught for many years in the Los Angeles area, later becoming a reading specialist and school administrator. She and her husband had one child, a son who is the highly regarded Stanford University-based Dr. Clete Kushida, a sleep disorders specialist.
Miss Miyamoto returned the Big Island after retiring in 1990. Newspaper reports show that she became quite a skilled golfer and played in many tournaments on the island. In a newspaper article a few years before her death she wrote about her love of the Big Island and about her joy in returning to it after so many years on the mainland. Miss Miyamoto died in 2018 at the age of 87.
I like to think that Miss Miyamoto would be pleased that the naughty boy shooting crayons over her classroom wall became a teacher, reading specialist, and school administrator, too.