For class member Leo Polo, 64, and others, memories of going to school barefoot and playing marbles in the dirt at recess stir nostalgia for a simpler time.

"In those days, we all grew up together, so we all played together. We knew everybody's parents and brothers and sisters," said Polo, whose father was an accountant for Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. "We made our own things to play with, like a walkie-talkie with two cans and a string."

"We didn't realize life was tough. We never had things like televisions, but we didn't think we had it rough," said Polo, now a Wailuku resident and manager for an industrial supplier.

Another 1954 Pu'unene School graduate, Linda Andrade Wheeler of Kihei — known then as one of the five "Andrade girls" — said her friends played bean-bag and string games every chance they got, or another game that involved tossing into the air a handful of beans from the monkeypod trees that shade the school grounds to see how many they could catch on the back of their hand.

The Class of 1929 was among the first to attend Pu'unene School, a plantation grammar school now designated as a historic place. Christie Wilson • The Honolulu Advertiser *Photo courtesy Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum

Pu'unene was once one of Maui's most populated areas, with 8,000 to 10,000 people living in two dozen camps often identified by the status and ethnicity of their residents. Wheeler's grandfather, a Portuguese immigrant, worked in the mill, and her father was an engineer there. Her family lived in Haole Camp, reserved for company managers.

Polo lived in Spanish B Camp, which included a mix of Hawaiians, Japanese and Filipinos.

Wheeler said the children were largely oblivious to the distinctions, because they studied and played together at Pu'unene School. "Only in retrospect did I realize that it was segregated," she said. "But back then it had an integrated feeling, a nice, secure feeling."

The original school was on Pu'unene Road, and a new building opened nearby in the 1920s. The plantation camps began emptying out in the 1950s and '60s, and were plowed under for sugarcane fields as workers moved into more modern housing in Kahului and elsewhere.

Reunion chairman Larry Peralta, 64, who is retired and lives in Kaka'ako on O'ahu, regularly phones classmates around the state and on the Mainland to keep in touch. He also helped organized the group's last reunion 15 years ago.

Peralta, whose father was an HC&S crane operator, fondly recalls the tight bonds within the community, and the fun stuff like swimming in irrigation ditches, playing baseball and working in the school garden growing tomatoes, corn, onions and lettuce. He was also a bit of a rascal, stealing pies as they cooled in the school cafeteria.

"We would go house to house for lunch," he said. "All the families worked on the plantation. Nobody was higher than anybody else. Everybody was equal."

Peralta feels so strongly about his small-kid days at Pu'unene School that he wrote a heartfelt poem for the 50th-year reunion, which kicks off tonight with dinner at 6:30 at Cary and Eddie's Hideaway in Kahului. Three former teachers are expected to attend: Adrienne Ogata, Masami Fukuoka and Masami Yamato.

Class members will visit the school from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. tomorrow and reconvene Sunday at Kama'ole III beach park for more food and talk story.