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the back seat and was prepared for the long bumping ride. There was
singing; there were school yells ("On, Oahu" was never forgotten
as the truck passed Oahu Prison) ; and there was noise galore as the
teachers struggled to keep heads and elbows safely within bounds.
There was much that was interesting along the way, since the
route lay through the mushrooming military installations and
skirting Pearl harbor, where shipping movements could be plainly
seen. And then there were the lovely morning lights on the hills
and on the peaceful fields below. It was fun, on arrival, to don
work gloves and goggles, to have a bango like any laborer, and to
make friends at lunch-time with the Filipino lunas, some of whom
had worked in these fields for twenty years. And there was a
certain glow of pride in doing useful work, especially if one broke
production records as "Dodo" Sylva did, and found lunas coming
from adjoining fields to watch her do it! Occasionally there was a
birthday with cake and candles smuffled aboard the bus for a
noon-time feast. But always there were rows and rows of slips
or suckers to be pulled and packed, or of weeds to be hoed, or
fruit to be picked. It was heavy work and many a girl and some
boys slept all the way home, in spite of noise and jolts.

In the third year still another plan was adopted. Each school
worked in the fields for a five-day period beginning on Wednesday,
so that teh week-end provided a rest interval. Three or four such
periods represented a school's share of the year's work. The plan
had marked advantages in interrupting school work far less, and it
saved time in the fields, sine one set of instructions generally
sufficed for the whole week's work. The five-day period was
therefore continued, but during the last semester, after the war
was over, opposition developed to the compulsory feature and so
once more the work was voluntary. Campus "chores" were the
alternative.

As long as the field work was compulsory, provision had to be
made for those who were excused -- the so-called "4F's." These
included about a hundred girls, on the average, including all the
8th grade girls, who were not allowed to do the field work, and
from a dozen to twenty boys, victims of hay-fever and similar
ailments, or occasional convalescents for whom field work was
thought to be too strenuous. The Junior Red Cross provided a
number of suggestions for the boys but most of the girls became
expert workers at the surgical dressing station at Sears. Their
production records were excellent. During the height of the
Pacific war when special need for dressings was announced, a
dozen boys joined the girls and, with their heads duly veiled,
proved to have fingers only a little less nimble than those of their
more experienced sisters.

A few of the girls who had taken the home nursing course under
Miss Bateman were allowed to use their "pineapple time" for
extra service at the hospitals where they worked regularly several
hours after school on other days.

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