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In this chapter I share the beginnings of a larger project I have undertaken to understand my mothers. Because I am so close to the people I introduce to you, I have chosen to present my work in the form of a personal narrative. This, I hope, will help you understand that individual lives were and still are being changed because of the choices my ancestor-mothers made. In terms of the microcosm of my own experience as well as the larger picture of the gospel and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Asia and the Pacific, we discover three generations of women who happened to be in significant places at significant times. These women are my great-grandmother Olivia Sessions Waddoups, my grandmother Mary Waddoups Bradford, and my mother, Mary Lou Bradford Bingham. Their proximity to and sometimes unheralded involvement in these events provide insight into how individual lives are absorbed into a larger institutional narrative whose patterns may appear familiar. By teasing out details of the lives of my mothers, I find courage, strength, and faith in their examples of triumph and even in examples of failure.

Sketch of bird of paradise constellation formed by tracing the path of Olivia, Mary, and Mary Lou as they worked to build the kingdom of God in the Pacific. Courtesy of Mary Bingham Lee.

Reading history can be painful as the nuanced complexities of systems and cultures become more apparent with hindsight; what my grandmothers knew as truth about certain events, people, cultures is not the same truth I see from this time and place. And yet I have found touchpoints of belief that can become instructive in my own life. I have documented what can be documented through academic means; I have offered what is sometimes family lore, with the understanding that it is one of many perspectives that could be offered on history. I have sought to know my wise mothers—��ū��ܲԲ�, honored elder ancestors. I feel as though they might like to know me too—or maybe already do. Hopefully we will all know one another better after this exploration of journals, interviews, recounting of memory and sharing.

I am an artist. Part of my project entails ephemera that I have created as I have been inspired by the lives and sacrifices of these mothers. Much like the metaphor of a family tree is useful in creating patterns and images that we can trace and follow, I have been reaching for meaningful imagery that can be helpful expressions of what I have learned about my family history that is so tightly bound to the strength and beauty of the Islands. I humbly admit I do not have the power of mele (Hawaiian chants, songs, or poems) or oli (Hawaiian chants that tell a story) to help me, but I will weave words to “talk story” as best as I can. In tracing the travels of my mothers on the world map, I have seen a pattern that resembles a constellation. While it is based on the actual geography of their travels, I find meaning in the purpose of their travels—to serve others, to share the gospel, to foster sisterhood, to help one another, and to love their fellow human beings. In the constellation that emerges, the stars, or touch points, begin in and around Salt Lake, Bountiful, and Iosepa (Utah), track southward or down to Provo and Spanish Fork, veer left and down, over the great ocean, to Hawai‘i, further down to Samoa and New Zealand, and back to the edges of the desert of the Great Basin. There are traces that reach down and right to Moab, Utah; Tucson, Arizona; and McAllen, Texas. To my mind, the resulting image, or constellation, resembles a bird of paradise, the colorful subtropical flower. Maybe you can see it too? It has become a constellation that is already an almost constant guide for me in my life.

My grandmother Mary Waddoups Bradford came to live with us in McAllen, Texas, when I was eight years old. Her gray, curled, not-quite-beehive but not 1976-modern-woman hair betrayed her actual youthful spryness. Of course, she was ancient in my eyes, but Grandma was still capable of riding a horse, jumping a fence, or chasing down a stray calf. She just didn’t want to do any of those things anymore. The usual twinkle in her blue eyes had gone. Her music had stopped. She was in search of a rocking chair she could drag up onto the front porch and occupy until life was over.

At age sixty-two, life seemed like it couldn’t end soon enough now that her best friend was gone. Mary had just lost her husband, Rawsel. He died in the same place they first met when she was thirteen and he was eighteen—in ����‘i��, Hawai‘i. The very last time they were in ����‘i�� together, they were three months into a mission for their beloved church. Rawsel William Bradford—or Raws, as he was called his whole life—stood up and excused himself from their small living room where they were in the middle of a visit from their mission supervisors. As he opened the door to rejoin the meeting a few moments later, he fell to the floor. Mary knew that the happiest chapters of her life were over.

Much of what is here first came to me as stories my grandmother told me when we shared a room for a time just after her husband’s death. I’m sure it was odd for her to be sharing a room with her small grandchild in the house where she and Raws had once lived together as a happy couple. I’m not sure if she was trying to comfort me, or herself, or just pass the time with me. I’ve talked with many people in my search for understanding of my mothers who could corroborate my memories of her stories—and I have also been able to share stories that she seemed to have only shared with me.

Mary moved into her own place next door to us after we had been roommates for only a short time. For the rest of my life, no matter where we moved, she was always just next door or up the street. It was a privilege to have her so close and involved in my life. I also had the privilege of being at her side as she finally got to go home to her parents, siblings, and most especially the love of her life, Raws. Her passing was sweet and calm.

Olivia Sessions Waddoups

Mary Waddoups Bradford was the daughter of William and Olivia Sessions Waddoups, who had been missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for all her young life. Her father, whose personality eventually inspired others to call him Will, the more endearing form of his given name, was a slight man who wore kindness the way some men wear red-faced, square-jawed anger. He was what one might think kindness resembled when embodied in the shape of a man: unimposing in stature but certainly not small; he was neatly dressed and composed. Even when his shirtsleeves were rolled up and he was knee-deep digging in mud, he could look up at a person and smile with his blue eyes and make you feel as though all was well. Everything, everywhere was just fine, or if it wasn’t, it would be. He was bookish-turned-wise-academic, with a bit of farm boy wistfulness and wonder. I have never heard a negative word spoken about him by anyone.[1]

Olivia Sessions Waddoups drawn from the portrait displayed in my childhood home. Courtesy of Mary Bingham Lee.

Olivia is spoken of with reverence as well, but in a different sort of way. She was the type of woman who made weak men afraid and brave men want to please her. She was kind but not too demonstrative, and her blue eyes could slide, just ever so, into iciness when she witnessed a slight or an injustice. While Will was pushed to anger only in the face of dishonesty, Olivia might have been less patient with smaller infractions, and her dander could be gotten up.[2]

She was perfectly matched with her husband in her ability to be naturally well acquitted.

She added dignified adornment to her daily wear in the form of jewelry and was well coiffed always, without ever being garish or cheap. Her sartorial aura was not to be believed entirely; she was a lady, of course; she wasn’t, for all that, a stuffy sort of woman. She was capable when she found it according to her own desires, of turning a cartwheel or doing a handstand. She also could quell the fears of anyone who needed assurance but deferred to Will in moments when her own hopes occasionally faltered.[3]

One could assume by all appearances they were the sort of people who had never known sorrow or deprivation. It might have been easy to believe their privilege had always kept them safe. And yet we see, after a look at their history, that their calm and sense of assurance came from a different source than material stability. In truth, that stability was often teetering in the balance for much of their lives. Their assurance definitely came from a sense of purpose and the idea that all could—or would—eventually be made right if not by the ultimate and sheer goodness of humankind, definitely by the intervention of a benevolent and just God as we see expressed in many of their correspondences with their children and their Church leaders.

They were both children of pioneer stock and polygamist families who had settled in Bountiful, Utah, just north of Salt Lake City, and had prospered. They were educated in folksy ways of farm life and lofty ideals of religion, manners, and book life. It was a perfect combination for dreams and ambition to take hold of them and send them looking for adventure in the form of hard work and service to their fellow man.[4]

Iosepa

The young couple took a teaching position in the Utah-based Hawaiian colony of Iosepa for the first year of marriage, some sixty miles west of Salt Lake City and just beyond the Stansbury Mountains. They moved away for a few years, only to find themselves called back by the Brethren of the Church.[5] The colony consisted almost entirely of Pacific Islanders who, hearing the call of the prophet Joseph (Iosepa in Hawaiian) F. Smith, to complete the vicarious saving ordinances of their ancestors in the house of the Lord, sold what they had in their island homes, and moved to the Salt Lake City area to be near the closest temple in Logan; then, when the Salt Lake Temple was completed in 1893, they attended to their beloved departed ancestors there. These were pioneers who voyaged northeast across the wide ocean expanse to Zion.[6]

What the Hawaiian pioneers found there in 1889 was the inverse of their island life: an ancient, parched, and dried seabed with only remnants of what used to be a prehistoric roiling ocean. They found fossils of ocean life and flattened waves that were evident in their silhouettes of salt imprinted on the land mile after mile. The West Desert of the Salt Lake Valley pounded the shores of the Great Salt Lake, where brine shrimp and brine flies swarmed. These small creatures seemed to be the only life-forms tone-deaf enough to the natural order of things that they lived long after everything else gave up. It was a cruel oasis in a desert that promised refuge from a distance and offered non-potable hospitality up close.

Those Hawaiian Saints had welcomed missionaries and the gospel to the islands with the aloha spirit. The aloha spirit (or aloha chant) is a code of ethics taught to children starting at a very young age with an acrostic attributed to the beloved ��ū��ܲԲ� Auntie Pilahi Paki:

A—Akahai, meaning kindness, to be expressed with tenderness;

L—Lōkahi, meaning unity, to be expressed with harmony;

O—Olu‘olu, meaning agreeable, to be expressed with pleasantness;

H—Ha‘aha‘a, meaning humility, to be expressed with modesty;

A—Ahonui, meaning patience, to be expressed with perseverance.

This code informs Hawaiians’ treatment of one another as well as visitors.[7] This same spirit was applied generously to those who brought the restored gospel to Hawai‘i, so it follows that the Hawaiian Saints would expect to be welcomed to the seat of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with reciprocal love and respect.

Upon their arrival in the Great Basin promised land, they found what could easily have been taken for a mockery of their island paradise. They were welcomed with a dry, shriveled version of generosity among some of Salt Lake’s Saints who refused to live, worship, or do business with them. Much to the dismay of the Church’s leadership, the islanders were forced to build a colony separate from Salt Lake City to the west in Skull Valley. The Church saw fit to subsidize their efforts at Iosepa financially and offer helping hands that knew the climate and the economy and who were qualified to teach in makeshift schools. The resulting organization resembled plantation communities of ����‘i�� and other of the Church’s earlier communal colonies.[8]

Will and Olivia were among a few sent by the Brethren to serve in whatever way they could. Will had served a mission in Hawai‘i and could speak the language. He was the postmaster, justice of the peace, manager at mercantile, cattleman, and shepherd. He generally did whatever needed done. Olivia held basically the same position as Will, that of getting what needs done, but she had no official title in it all. Her area of expertise had more to do with the daily care and keeping of the people who had wants, whether their own little crowd of children—there were five—or the community at large, roughly two hundred, depending upon who was visiting any particular day.[9]

By 1911 that little enclave had built homes, a church, a mercantile, schools, and irrigation systems. The Saints dug ponds by hand and stocked them with fish. They built Kanaka Lake Reservoir, where they swam and picnicked. It became more and more like their island home. They planted trees and roses. Their yellow–rose–lined streets were well kept, watered by irrigation systems, and even featured fire hydrants every few blocks. In fact, in 1911 the town was deemed “Best Kept and Most Progressive City in the State of Utah.” Like the early pioneers who entered the Salt Lake Valley with the edict to make the desert bloom as a rose, the population of Iosepa managed to thrive despite the hostility of the promised land, at least for a time and especially after the turn of the century.[10]

Their closest neighbors were the residents of the Goshute Reservation, and they all created a community in a place that even now symbolizes desolation. Today, the phrase “taking a walk out into the West Desert” is a local euphemism for taking one’s own life.

Olivia carried six pregnancies to term during the eleven years she lived in Iosepa, and though she went back to her mother’s home to give birth to those children, she experienced her pregnancies, recovered from childbirth, nursed her babies, and lost her babies there. In 1910 she gave birth to a set of twins, one of which was stillborn, and in 1912, Rex, her six-year-old son passed away from pneumonia. Their little bodies were sent back to the land of Bountiful for burial, and the Waddoups family carried on their own lives with their friends in the West Desert.[11] Olivia wrote about this incident years later in a life sketch: “While in Iosepa, we were only twelve miles from the Indian Reservation, and they were in and out of our home constantly. I nursed an Indian baby and a Hawaiian baby for three and a half months and fed my own baby cow’s milk at the same time. And all grew well and the other sick mothers grew strong and well as they were too sick to care for their babies. We were thirty miles (Grantsville) from a Dr. or other white women.”[12]

Mary, my grandmother, was Olivia’s last baby. The attending doctor pronounced Olivia dead as Mary drew her own little first breath—as if taking in the very last breath of Olivia and keeping it for herself. Yet, as Olivia found herself standing above her own body looking down, observing her husband weeping on her chest and her confused children crying, Olivia chose to return to her body. She could see she was needed. Deciding to climb back into her physical envelope was like trying to rouse herself out of a warm bed on a freezing cold day. Olivia took comfort knowing that peace would be waiting when she finally passed through to the next life again.[13]

Olivia lived another fifty-six years before she made that crossing again. Instead, she made the ocean crossing to Hawai‘i and back again countless times, casting the arch of a constellation across wide ocean waves. When The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a new temple was to be built in Lā’ie, Hawai‘i, passage would be paid for all those who wanted to return to the islands.[14] The Waddoups family went as well. They boarded the SS Manoa and set sail. It was 1918. My grandmother Mary was five years old.[15]

����‘i��

Mary traveled with her parents, two sisters, and brother from San Francisco to Honolulu. The sumptuousness of Hawai‘i after her life in the desert was as thick as the air was humid. She thought that Bountiful had been the greenest place on earth, a Garden of Eden, but the islands were a delight and wonder to her five-year-old senses.[16]

They were met at the ship by a Brother Miner in a Model T. The wind blew so hard as they drove along the Pali Road that they all had to hold onto the rag roof of the car to keep it from breaking loose and flying away. She remembers looking down over the cliff and thinking that it would be a wonderful life there.[17]

Grandma told me that her father wasn’t initially in charge, and they were all required to abide by the existing rules of the mission in the early days of their time in Hawai‘i. The women and girls were required to wear dresses that covered their collarbones, their wristbones, and their anklebones. They also were supposed to wear shoes and stockings. In my mind, I imagined the dresses as wool dresses, but I can’t verify that. Grandma told me with a chuckle that it was the best day of her life when the mantle of authority was finally passed to her father and he turned to her and said, “Mary, go and get some reasonable clothes on!” She ran and put on a little cotton shift and left her shoes and stockings in a heap on the floor.[18]

From their earliest days on the island, Mary and her siblings ran around barefoot and were happy to work and play and explore their glorious home. Their father was not only mission president, but he and Olivia were the first president and matron of the Hawaiian temple. At the time, children of Primary age were allowed to participate in baptisms for the dead. This activity bound the children together (in ways unlike contemporary temple practice): the Waddoups children did over ten thousand baptisms in the temple, while Thomas did over sixty-five hundred and Mary added more than three thousand.[19] Miriam and Wilda also helped. The family found great joy in attending the temple together.

Within two years, tragedy would strike as Wilda passed away, a victim of the Spanish influenza.[20] Once again, Olivia and Will sent a beloved child’s body back to Bountiful to be buried. I like to think that the precious time spent together in the temple as a family helped in coping with the temporary loss of Wilda. They had faith that they would all be together as a family again. Though they struggled without Wilda (especially Miriam, who missed her sister and home and asked to return to the mainland to finish school), they found solace knowing their separation would not be permanent.[21]

Tom and Mary were left together on the island with their parents, and they became inseparable. Their best friends were the children of Mr. Okawa, the gardener. Together the little pack of kids ran about, wrestled, climbed trees, swam, and shouted to one another in pidgin English. Mary and Tom had adopted that and Hawaiian as easily as they took to water.[22]

Hamana, Will’s friend and assistant, had taught the children to swim and kept a close eye on them when he saw the children head toward the ocean. (Hamana Kalili is known as the father of the hand gesture known as the shaka. He lost his three middle fingers in an accident in the sugarcane fields so that when he waved, people would respond by folding down their own fingers and waving back.) They had been rescued twice already, once on Goat Island when the tide rolled in, and they couldn’t walk back. Will and Hamana swam out to bring them home. Another time Hamana called them out of the water. They obeyed because his tone was serious—when normally he was easygoing. A shark had been swimming near them. Hamana said it was a shark with bad intentions. After it was caught and gutted, they found the remains of a missing soldier inside.[23]

Mary’s other dear friend was Ay-u, the Chinese cook, who, despite calling the children a “rotten kind” for lifting the lids of steaming rice pots, spoiled Mary with small treats and was teaching her to cook food from his own childhood.[24] He pitied her for knowing only Western food and showed her delicacies that he thought were essential for a good and proper life: small bits of meat that had been marinated in delicate sauces and seared to perfection, bean paste tucked into pastries, delicate broth that he had seasoned with flavors beyond the homespun salt, pepper, and occasional wild onion or sage that the pioneer people would have used in their soups.[25]

I have memories of my grandmother making me similar treats: I still see her hands in my mind’s eye. As they grew old and gnarled, she would wet her smooth palms, salt them as if she were preparing them to be cooked, and then she would reach for a handful of rice and form a small bird’s nest in her cupped palm. Next, she filled the hollow of the rice nest with marinated meat or fish, and finally she would top it with an igloo-shaped rice dome. She finished by packing the rice into a ball that she would wrap in Saran Wrap for my lunch. Sometimes we just sat and ate them together. I often think of the hollow of her hand before age, hard work, and sorrow left their marks there. When she learned to make these savory little packages, her hands were probably still tiny. She passed on her childhood memories to me: from Ay-u to little Mary Waddoups to me. I tell the story to my own family as I pass on the tradition.

Will and Olivia both indulged the children with a freedom to roam, but they also assigned them chores—even if those chores often turned into games. The children were charged with keeping the weeds out of the grass around the temple grounds. The Okawa children went with them to patrol the area for intruding growth, but Will often found that they had abandoned their rounds for the mango trees, where they climbed and scavenged succulent fruit. He feigned a stern rebuke, and the children would all run screaming back to their duties.[26]

After their chores were done, my grandmother would tell me that they were all allowed to swim in the reflecting pools that cascaded down from the top of the temple hill. Hamana, Mr. Okawa, and Will captured a sea turtle and let it loose in one of the largest pools, where Mary and the other children took turns riding on its back as it swam from one end of the pool to the other. Mary often announced proudly that she had helped her father and Mr. Okawa plant the royal palms that still stand today along those reflecting pools.

Will and Olivia continued to care for the temple and the mission as their children grew. There were months that the family traveled back and forth to Utah, staying sometimes for short periods, and at other times extended periods so the children could be with their family there. By the time they were looking toward their future and how they might spend their days after their temple calling ended, Miriam had finished school and was working in Honolulu as a secretary, Tom was in law school on the mainland, and Mary was finishing high school.[27]

Will continued to work for the Church and its investments, or at times he took work in the private sector. Over the next few years, they were in ����‘i��, Honolulu, Sāmoa, and New Zealand. During one stretch of time, he worked at a mortuary—he was on call December 7, 1941. Will spent three days without sleep as he worked to gather and identify remains of the victims so that families could know about their loved one’s fates. He rarely spoke about this terrible time, but my own mother remembers that he was sobered by his experiences.[28]

One day Mary received a heart-shaped box of chocolates delivered to the house with a diamond ring in a fancy pink ring box nestled among the nuts and chews. She would be married, and there would be two just again at home.[29]

Will and Olivia continued to serve and work for the Church and in the private sector. Their constellations across the ocean grew. Olivia’s journals note that she was not fond of sailing but that it was a necessary means to an end. We see why one journey may have been uncomfortable in what could be a throwaway detail on one of William’s autobiographical notes: “August 3rd Sunday while eating lunch in the Clinton Cafeteria in San Francisco, Olivia’s chair slipped from under her, dropping her to the floor. In the fall her right leg was broken near the hip. She was taken to the emergency hospital and from there to Mary’s Helper Hospital where the bone was set and both legs and torso placed in a cast. On the 6th we went aboard the S.S. Monterey arriving in Honolulu August 11th.”[30] Their injuries and hardships were not the focus of their journal keeping. In fact, often we read that they felt it was not worthwhile to complain.

Kalaupapa

Years later and after a different and accident-free voyage across the Atlantic from California, Olivia met with another hardship. Will had accepted a job with the Territory of Hawaii to be the resident superintendent of the physical facilities at a colony on the island of Kalaupapa.[31] This colony was like Iosepa because of the isolation of the island and location on a peninsula beneath a cliff. People who were infected with leprosy were sent to the colony to protect the general population from contracting the disease. Sometimes their families traveled with them to live in the colony even though they were not infected.

At the time Kalaupapa was established, it was thought that leprosy was highly contagious. The colony is surrounded by many myths and stories including the idea that those infected with the disease were thrown over the edge of a ship and forced to swim to the island of Moloka‘i. There were only two ways to access the colony: from the ocean it was difficult to land big ships and boats on shore as the rocks and reefs made it dangerous. It is not true that people were thrown overboard and made to swim. This idea was an invention of James A. Michener’s novel Hawaii (1959).[32]

The second way to access the colony was by mule or on foot, down a steep trail along a high cliff that was called the Pali. This was more common for people to travel down to the colony.

I learned through my mother’s telling that Olivia broke her back on the descent down the Pali to Kalaupapa when they arrived for Will to take up his post. They were riding mules down the 3.5 miles of rocky switchbacks to reach the isolated leper colony when Olivia’s mule spooked and bucked her off. Olivia’s journals have no account of the accident itself, except to remark on some days that she may have strained her bad back a bit and should have taken it easy.[33]

They lived and worked for three years in Kalaupapa and spoke of it with great fondness.[34] Will helped build the colony’s infrastructure and maintain the hospital, church, and housing. They became dear friends with the residents there, celebrating and mourning their lives and deaths. Will and Olivia also forged strong ties with those from other denominations who were serving in Kalaupapa. They hosted the priests and sisters from the Catholic church in their home and they organized activities and charity events on the island together. Olivia made a special note in her journal about a “Buddhist priest” who would bring her a live chicken wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper and tied in ribbon as a gift each Christmas.[35]

Mary (Waddoups) Bradford

Mary Waddoups Bradford lived with my family most of my life. Courtesy of Mary Bingham Lee.

Not far from Kalaupapa, Mary and Raws were serving a mission in ����‘i�� with their small family. Raws was born in Spanish Fork, about a hundred miles south and east of Iosepa, where Mary was born. They both had to travel across an ocean before they met and fell in love.

Raws and Mary met in the mission home when he was a young, new missionary following in the footsteps of his father, who served a mission in Hawai‘i as well. Thirteen-year-old Mary was setting the table for dinner and spied him out of the corner of her eye. Mary remarked that her first impression of him was: that freckled missionary in a bow tie seemed a little bit too sure of himself. “The first time I saw Grandpa [Raws], I thought to myself, ‘you arrogant pup!’”[36]

He strutted off that boat and into her life, and she was not sure he deserved to spend time with her. The first day as he was trying to sweettalk her at the mission home, they walked out onto the lanai and Mary spotted a large spider. She scooped it up, turned, and handed it to Raws before he knew what was happening. He jumped back in surprise, and she laughed at this self-assured boy losing his composure. Because he was a prankster himself, the sauciness of this girl only made him like her more. They soon were exchanging sweet glances and notes.[37]

Out of a keen sense of missionary duty, Raws eventually professed his love for Mary to her father—his mission president. President Waddoups didn’t make this missionary feel bad for loving Mary. He explained that he understood why Raws would love such a special young woman. She was Will’s pride and joy, and he loved her too. President Waddoups sent Raws back to his work with a kind smile and a reassuring nod. Raws felt as though he was the luckiest missionary alive until the next morning when he received notice that he was to be transferred to a different island.[38]

Mary was smitten with Raws, and her father indulged her by occasionally “running into the missionaries” on “accident.”[39] Will had hoped that Mary would complete nursing school before marrying, but Mary and Raws couldn’t be convinced to wait to marry.[40] They married soon after Raws finished his mission and sent for Mary. She was eighteen.

Having been so in love with Raws for most of her life when my Grandmother Mary came to live with us, Mary’s world didn’t exist outside of Raws. Mary died when Raws died, or at least the independent tomboy she once was disappeared. A different Mary replaced her. The sparkle eventually came back in part—but quieter. She didn’t wind up sitting in a rocking chair at all. My grandmother led a busy, active life. She lived on my parents’ property in Tucson, Arizona, in her own little home for the next thirty-five years. As matriarch of a large family, she was the guiding star for us. Her testimony was bright and strong. When you entered her home, it felt like you were entering the temple. She often told stories of her time in Hawai‘i and made sure that we knew that the gospel of Jesus Christ combined with service to their fellow travelers was the motivation of their lives’ work.

Mary Waddoups Bradford and her daughter Mary Lou Bradford Bingham. Courtesy of Mary Bingham Lee.

Mary continued to serve even as she grew older. She gathered a band of widows who climbed in her baby blue Cadillac and drove the two hours from Tucson to Mesa to work in the temple there. They made record time as they screamed down the highway, sister Saints with nothing to lose on the Lord’s mission. She found peace in service.

Tomboy Mary resurfaced briefly before her death in 2009. Maybe it is what happens when one grows old, but Grandma seemed to want to tell stories she hadn’t previously shared. One revelation was that she was a surfer as a child, she had learned from a friend of her brother’s. He was called the Duke—the same Duke Kahanamoku who was an Olympic swimming medalist and who had popularized surfing as a sport. She thought he was a pretty good surfer. She knew it was unladylike to surf, but she had loved it. She was glad to confess it finally.[41]

We knew Mary had a lovely voice and sang in church settings, but in her later years she talked more about traveling around the island with her brother, singing duets in hot spots and welcoming steam liners when they docked. They met many people who visited the islands, and she had glamorous stories to tell about celebrities and friends. But there were also other sides to my grandmother’s life that she became braver about sharing.[42]

She was finally not afraid to admit that life was not always perfect. She, like her mother, had the chance to choose whether to stay and raise her children. She described a difficult day on the Utah farm when she had three young children. She had buried a baby, and she missed him on this day. She also missed the islands and her own family, who was far away. Marriage wasn’t easy. Being an in-law wasn’t easy. The desert wasn’t easy. Living in Utah felt like she had fallen through the looking glass, and everything was backwards and wrong. She packed a small suitcase and climbed the ladder to the hayloft in the barn while Raws and the kids were out on an errand. She decided to wait for dark and then slip away. They would be fine without her. They had plenty of family that would step in and help. Raws would manage—he was a good man. She just didn’t have what it took to stay. When the children ran into the yard calling to her, she bit her bottom lip and kept quiet. Raws called out in search of her when she didn’t respond. Soon they were frantic and then defeated. Raws fed the children supper and put them to bed. Mary did wait until dark. Then she climbed down the ladder with her little suitcase and went inside and slipped in bed beside Raws.[43]

I tell this story because it helped me understand. It didn’t make me like my grandparents less or think less of their marriage. It made me understand my own struggles as normal. I had five children when I heard this story for the first time. I had spent a few moments of my own, sitting in a car, wondering if I wanted to go back home to the chaos or drive to the freeway and never go back.

Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham

It also helped me understand my own mother. She and my father had eight children. In the same spirit passed down by her grandparents (and my father’s), their home was welcoming to an extra person at the dinner table, and they were ready to help with whatever was needed.

But life was not always easy for my mother, and I know there were days that she valiantly pushed through the desire to quit. She showed up not only for her husband and children but also for her in-laws, her own parents, and brothers for their whole lives.

Mary Lou Bradford Bingham. Courtesy of Mary Bingham Lee.

My mother, Mary Lou, traveled another path in my bird of paradise constellation. She was Mary and Raws’s oldest child. At the age of thirteen in 1945, she and her two younger brothers left their home in Moab, Utah, with their parents and sailed for Honolulu. Mary Lou had been riding horses in the red rock desert of Moab and working at their family’s drugstore after school, when she was told that her family was to move to ����‘i�� so that her parents could serve a mission at the temple.[44]

They sailed as a family. After World War II, the ship was filled half with civilians and half with soldiers. Daily evacuation exercises were required, and Mary Lou, because of a clerical error, found that she had been assigned to a different lifeboat from her own family. For days she was panicked at the thought of being separated from her family in case of an evacuation, as she ran through the motions of an imaginary catastrophe. Aside from the drastic change from desert to ocean, she was suddenly faced with a strange sort of mortality she had never really considered—that of being alone in the world.[45]

She often was alone when they reached ����‘i��. She and her brothers rode the bus to school early every morning from the old mission home where they lived. In her school in Kahuku, she was the only haole (a non-native Hawaiian and usually of European ancestry). Between every class, during the passing period the Japanese boys pushed her off the porches of the school. Tensions were high after the war, and this young American girl from the West seemed to embody what these boys hated. She endured this for a while, until she made friends with Sāmoan girls. Life got better.[46]

Now that she had friends, she found island life was lovely. She also found that she had work to do. Her responsibilities consisted of watching her little brother after school. Richard was five years old. He was a handful—at five he was already playing marbles for money on the playground at school and making plans to build his own small dynasty. Mary Lou had to keep a close eye on him.

She was also charged with making dinner and having it on the table for her parents when they arrived home from the temple visitors’ center each day. Between these obligations and homework, she was a busy teenager. They lived and worked in ����‘i�� for almost three years.

Mary’s childhood friend Hamana was still around, and Mary Lou learned to love him as much as her mother did. He helped save Mary Lou and her brother in the tidal wave of April 1, 1946. Together they ran and warned people of the danger of staying in their homes, and in the aftermath dozens of people stayed with them and slept on the floor of their home until they could return to their own houses.

Later in Mary Lou’s life, she and her husband would help make it possible for that last mission in Hawai‘i for Raws and Mary. They would move from Tucson, Arizona, to McAllen, Texas, to take over operation of the family businesses and home of Mary and Raws. The plan was for Mary Lou and her husband to keep their affairs in order so that after a three-year mission in Hawai‘i Raws and Mary could drop back into their life in McAllen. Mary Lou and Bill would return to Arizona, where they had taken a three-year leave of absence from Bill’s job as an optical engineer. The story took a turn that no one had anticipated when Raws passed away and Mary came to live with us.

Mary Bingham Lee

I am the youngest child of Mary Lou. For years I followed her every step and was in sync with her every movement. When her mother, Mary came to live with us after her world collapsed, I was witness. Traces of their travels, their habits, their experience have been drawn in a map in my mind. The stories these women shared, the food they prepared, the tears they shed, their hesitations, and their hard work have informed my life.

Self-portrait of Mary Bingham Lee, 2023. Courtesy of Mary Bingham Lee.

I found that my mothers have traced a unique path I can look to for guidance. Their life travels have been motivated by principles that I cling to: faith in Jesus Christ, hard work, dignity, humility, love. It is the spirit of aloha, the spirit of loving your neighbor as yourself, the spirit of hospitality. What I know, more than anything, from the constellation of my mothers spanning the Mountain West to the Pacific Islands is that home is where you join in the work. It is where you love your neighbor as you love yourself. It may be an exotic place. It may be a nondescript suburb. It may be a desolate, fossilized sea that found new life as a desert. One may rent an apartment or own a condo or conquer a land or reclaim a nation, and that can be important. But not more important than how one respects, honors, nurtures, cares for, and shares in the stewardship of a place, a people, a belief. I have witnessed, in person and through the telling of my mothers, their testimony of this. Mahalo.

Notes

[1] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview by Mary Bingham Lee, January 2023.

[2] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview; Marcia Bradford Nielsen, interview by Mary Bingham Lee, January 2023.

[3] Susan Bingham Goodman and Marcia Bradford Neilson, interview by Mary Bingham Lee, January 2023.

[4] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries, 1904, William Waddoups and Olivia Waddoups diaries, MSS 8421, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University Provo, UT.

[5] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries, 1904–1908.

[6] Matthew Kester, Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the American West (Oxford University Press: New York, 2013), 77–78.

[7] Pilahi Paki, “The Aloha Chant,” Hoikaha, https://hoikaha.org/aloha-chant/.

[8] Kester, Remembering Iosepa, 103–36.

[9] Olivia Sessions Waddoups to Arnold J. Ivins, February 18, 1966.

[10] Kester, Remembering Iosepa, 126–29.

[11] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries, 1910–1912.

[12] Olivia Sessions Waddoups to Arnold J. Ivins, February 18, 1966.

[13] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview.

[14] Kester, Remembering Iosepa, 133.

[15] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries, July 22, 1918.

[16] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview.

[17] Mary Waddoups Bradford, interview by Natalie Bradford McKasson, Davis County, December 25, 1999.

[18] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview.

[19] Clinton D. Christensen, Stories of the Temple in ����‘i��, Hawai‘i (����‘i��, HI: Jonathan Napela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Islands Studies, 2019), 188.

[20] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries, 1920.

[21] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries, 1921.

[22] Bradford, interview.

[23] Bradford, interview.

[24] Bradford, interview.

[25] Bradford, interview.

[26] Bradford, interview.

[27] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries.

[28] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview.

[29] Mary Waddoups Bradford, interview.

[30] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries, August 1, 1941.

[31] Fred E. Woods, Kalaupapa: The Mormon Experience in the Exiled Community (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017), 118; see also 115–34.

[32] Anwei S. Law, Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), 5.

[33] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries.

[34] Woods, Kalaupapa, 118–20.

[35] William M. and Olivia Waddoups diaries.

[36] Bradford, interview.

[37] Bradford, interview.

[38] Bradford, interview.

[39] Bradford, interview.

[40] Willam Waddoups to Rawsel Bradford and Mary Waddoups Bradford, May 23, 1932.

[41] Discussion with Mary L. Winsor, February 2023.

[42] Discussion with Mary L. Winsor.

[43] Discussion with Mary L. Winsor.

[44] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview.

[45] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview.

[46] Mary Lou (Bradford) Bingham, interview.