Our Honolulu
Veins full of kindness, printer's ink

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

I hope Our Honolulu continues to breed outrageous characters like Raybern Freitas. Printers who can still hand-set type and who tramp the jungles of New Guinea don't happen along very often.

We both started at The Advertiser in the 1950s, but I was out in the newsroom and Raybern was in the back shop with the linotypes.

Young and naive, I assumed that college is where anthropologists come from and that historians study from books. Wrong!

It was Raybern and his family who helped the Mission Houses on King Street celebrate their 125th anniversary in 1981 by dressing up as missionaries and sleeping for a week in the second-floor bedrooms behind mosquito nets.

The plan was for me to write a daily story for The Advertiser, and Raybern would print it on the Mission House Museum's old hand-set press. It took him a week to figure out how to make the hand-set type print evenly. That's not something you can learn from history books.

Raybern stopped in my office on Halloween to say he was retiring after 45 years. "I really like my job but it's time to go," he said. "A linotype operator in the old days could set seven to eight lines of type in a minute. The first electronic machines could set 1,000 lines of text a minute."

He said the bad part of the old days was lead in the air and working in 100-degree heat for lack of ventilation. The good part was the close association with colorful editors who came to the back shop to make up pages of the newspaper like jigsaw puzzles by shifting blocks of type around on portable tables.

I could never understand what got Raybern interested in New Guinea. He's been there three times and is going back. Listen to him tell about it:

"I was there 28 days the first time and I learned what an Ugly American is. If people give you something to eat, you eat it. The Americans I was with pushed it away. We were invited out at night to look for crocodiles. They stayed inside to read.

"Why did they go to New Guinea? They embarrassed me. They talked stink about the people right in front of them. I was shocked.

"I love the people, the way they measure you when they see you are interested. Up in the highlands some natives came up to me when they learned I was from Hawai'i. They asked about leasing land to the Australian government for mining.

"I said I wouldn't. You lose control when you sign the lease and they put chemicals on the land. You get sick.

"For four days, I stayed in a little village three miles outside Port Moresby living with a family. I was washing my clothes in the stream. The man made me stop. His wife does that. But she has six kids. Men don't wash clothes."

Raybern said it was the same with a New Guinea family in Hawai'i while the husband attended the University of Hawai'i. The wife was not allowed to use the telephone alone, watch TV or shop by herself.