Arriving passengers on the SS Lurline would often be warmly greeted with lei from Islanders. Advertiser Library Photo • December 1963

And just beginning my Very Big Adventure.

Hundreds of feet above me on the pier, amid towering high-rises of a frighteningly large Los Angeles, loomed the magnificent buff and blue smokestacks of the gracious SS Lurline, the "White Old Lady of the Pacific."

This was our introduction, this magnificent ship and I - and before this 13-year-old would step off her decks five days later in Honolulu of 1963, I would have the most profound thought of my young life: "This is probably as happy as I'll ever be allowed to be."

I was right. And following days of getting to know her every nautical nook and cranny, it was a friendship with a sleek white ship that would last decades.

Other thoughts occupied my young mind as well: How mountains of luggage left unattended dockside could make it to our suite of rooms before we did. Or why shoes left to be shined by the stateroom door each night didn't get stolen at sea. Or how far behind the ship the white plume of propeller "froth" extended.

Soon, as kids will, I found a cadre of on-board friends who would also be students with me at 'Iolani that fall. Soon we were occupying our time at the Ping-Pong tables, not seeing how many balls we could get over the net but out the adjacent pothole window. A hana kokolele!

You "dressed" for dinner in the formal dining room even then. Ladies brought fine, long cocktail dresses for the Captain's Dinner and imaginative costumes for the Masquerade Ball.

The fragrances of the time - Chanel No. 5, Jade East, English Leather and Wicked Wahine - wafted up the grand staircase as passengers strutted like peacocks to the nightly parties.

On deck, a more casual dress - as passengers played shuffleboard or melted into teak deck chairs by the polished brass and hardwood deck railings - were to become the fashion trademarks of the era: short-shorts and shorty mu'us, bleeding madras and Weejuns.

"Boredom" was a word unheard of at sea: There were endless movies and Bingo games. Hawaiiana lectures and song contests. The ship's daily newspaper kept us in touch with an outside world, and pointed out peculiarities of our seaborne microcosm. With a library, theater, small hospital, gift shops, hair salons, chapel and golf driving range, the grand old ship was literally a floating city.

Statistics compared the number on eggs on board laid end to end as reaching however far around the equator, and the gallons of fresh water on board as adequate for this or that small Third World country. Her power plant could sustain this small city or that. She was a marvel - and a large one.

But most of all, she was a floating food court - everywhere, from grand dining rooms to poolside bars and quiet lounges, food, and lots of it, was manuahi. You chose from her grand trademark "pastel-painted Polynesian scene" menus that now - framed and proper, thank you - grace elegant Island residences.

Often I would forgo the many adult activities of the ship - afternoon movies, Bingo and geriatric card games, lectures and concerts - to indulge in what became my favorite shipboard pastime: hanging around our stateroom's lanai to talk story with our steward, Ken, as he worked. Ahhh, the stories of his Island boyhood "before my time" enthralled me. I loved Hawai'i and I loved this Island interlude.

New memories whirled around me as we arose at sunrise that last day to watch the grand ship glide past Diamond Head for home. Off Waikiki began the orchestrated arrival "boat ballet:" sailing yachts gracefully gliding in alongside, and fire boats sending their watery welcome high into the air.

Dockside, smiling youthful coin divers plummeted into the murky depths of Aloha Tower, after coins sent sailing over railings dauntingly by passengers. They seldom missed their quarry, depositing the coins in their mouths for safekeeping, their smile, their mahalo.

I anguished as departing passenger by passenger in line inched toward the gangplank. In but a few minutes, my memorable friendship with this beloved grand lady, the historic Lurline - would be history itself.

Years later, occasionally someone in our family would spy the graceful white lady gliding past Koko Head of an early morning, in the waters off our Wai'alae Iki home. We'd scurry into the yard to pick plumeria for impromptu lei. Like a bunch of anxious plovers returning home, we'd descend on a sleepy Sunday morning for a drive to an equally tranquil Irwin Park. There, shipside, we'd greet anonymous arriving passengers with lei as we'd once been and go visit our old stateroom and Ken, our steward.

It was a homecoming that spoke of gentler times past. And a reminder of a time I was so overwhelmingly and completely happy.

Wade Kilohana Shirkey writes the weekly Hawaiian Style in the Friday Advertiser. He writes on Island Life.

Share your memories from the late Lurline

When word came last week that the ship Hawai'i once knew as the Matsonia and then as the Lurline IV had sunk, memories flowed for many Islanders. Here, our own Wade Shirkey writes about his crossing aboard the late Lurline. If you've got shipboard memories of the vessel that served as the last Lurline, write us at Lurline Memories, Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802; fax 525-8034, or e-mail islandlife@honoluluadvertiser.com. We'll edit and publish some of the letters in the print edition and post a Lurline page on our Web site. Include name, the neighborhood where you live and a daytime phone where we can check with you if we have questions.

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