Kalaupapa’s Barbara ‘Bobbie’ Marks: ‘I wanted to learn’

By Valerie Monson
Special to the Herald

Barbara “Bobbie” Marks did not allow her love for learning to be shelved when she suddenly had to leave her cherished Sacred Hearts Academy in Kaimuki in 1946 because she was diagnosed with leprosy. Throughout her many years at Kalaupapa and Hale Mohalu in Pearl City, Barbara was a lifelong student, testing herself by trying new skills: math, painting, calligraphy and dancing. She was the first patient at Kalaupapa to own a home computer — and not for the games.

“I wanted to learn!” she said in her quiet yet resolute voice.

Barbara died shortly after midnight Aug. 17 at the Kalaupapa Care Home. She was 90.

“She was always interested in new things, very curious,” said Ellen Storm Rycraft, who helped to revive The Kalaupapa Craft Shop in 1994 where Bobbie’s creativity bloomed. “I feel she had a belief in her own ability. She wasn’t afraid to try.”

Bobbie’s longtime friend and sister-in-law, Winnie Marks Harada, agreed.

“She was a determined person,” said Winnie from Kalaupapa. “When she made up her mind about something, that was it.”

Barbara Waialeale had taken her first art class at Sacred Hearts where other favorite subjects were typing, Spanish and, as was common in those days at Catholic schools, Latin. She also could recite “The Our Father” (The Lord’s Prayer) in French. Her world was turned upside down when she was 15 and told to report to Kalihi Hospital.

Sadly enough, Bobbie was already too familiar with Kalihi. Barely eight years earlier, her aunt Christine Camacho, who had cared for Bobbie in her earliest years, had been admitted to Kalihi and, a year later, to Kalaupapa. It was Aunt Christine who would pick up Bobbie at the Kalaupapa Airport in 1947 for Bobbie’s new life.

Bobbie was assigned to live at The Bishop Home so she could be with other girls her own age, but she remained close to her aunt and her aunt’s husband, Joe Pang. A few years later Bobbie learned about the classes being offered at Hale Mohalu, the residential complex in Pearl City opened in 1949 as an alternative to Kalaupapa. Although Kalaupapa already felt like home, Bobbie decided to make a move. She would later graduate from Hale Mohalu, but not without some disappointment.

“I was going to take a special class in photography,” she said in one of several earlier interviews with this writer. “They wanted me for photography and (to learn) X-ray. But they did away with the teacher and they never got a darkroom so nothing happened.”

By 1959, she was ready to go home.

“That’s the longest I stayed out of Kalaupapa,” she said. “Even today, I cannot stand staying out too long. I always want to come home.”

Bobbie’s education and upbeat spirit enabled her to have many jobs at Kalaupapa: warehouse clerk, office clerk, store clerk, working in the dining room at McVeigh Hall, in the hospital and as an orderly at Bay View Home. Her favorite job was reading the mail to the older residents who had lost their eyesight. She would also write letters for them.

“Some of them leave it up to me, to answer the way I wanted to, the way I thought to,” she said. “I would read it back to them to see if it’s OK. … I tell about what they do, how they are, what Kalaupapa looks like so it’s not boring. I got to the point where I was running out of stories! I start to think I’m a broken record!”

Bobbie was already friends with Winnie Marks when she began seeing Winnie’s brother, Eddie, as inventive and creative as Bobbie. They married in 1962 and had a son, Kaipo.

Mother and son

Because of the still harsh policies that prevented Kalaupapa residents from keeping their children, Bobbie’s mother would raise the boy. It was a shattered bond that mother-and-son could never completely heal.

“You only know him as the word ‘son,’ “ she said. “But to really say he’s my son, he isn’t. Because I never took care of him, I never brought him up. I only know the word ‘alone son.’ “

Kaipo was also the source of Bobbie’s greatest personal tragedy. When she, Winnie and others from Kalaupapa were on a cruise in the Caribbean in 1993, Bobbie was summoned by the ship’s captain to take an emergency call: Her son had been murdered in Honolulu, killed when he was trying to break up a fight in the club where he was a part-time waiter.

Distraught and disoriented, Bobbie knew she had to get home, but how? Winnie came to her rescue, comforting her sister-in-law and taking charge of getting them back to Hawaii. Bobbie never forgot Winnie’s kindness and strength in a time of crisis and grief.

“In the condition I was in, I couldn’t think straight,” remembered Bobbie. “I said to her ‘If you didn’t come back with me, Winnie, I would’ve ended up somewhere else. Probably Russia!’ I didn’t know where I was going.”

To deal with her loss, Bobbie soon found refuge at the Craft Shop. She took on a complex painting of “The Lord’s Supper” which impressed Ellen Rycraft. Although it was a paint-by-numbers project, Ellen said it required skill and discipline. Upon completing that, Bobbie began her first attempt at a freehand portrait that she called “The Face of Christ.”

Ellen saw someone else in that painting.

“At some point, I was thinking that was her son,” said Ellen who became close to Bobbie through their mutual love of art. “There was a connection between that painting and her son. I think she did it for him.”

Both Bobbie’s paintings — “The Lord’s Supper” and “The Face of Christ” — were part of a special exhibit of Kalaupapa arts and crafts that were on display at The Maui Arts and Cultural Center in 1996.

Bobbie and Winnie would travel again. They were part of the Kalaupapa contingents who flew to Rome in 2009 and 2012 to witness the canonizations of Saints Damien and Marianne. Through it all, they were sisters-in-law who shared the joys and agonies of life.

Bobbie was laid to rest above a beach outside Kalaupapa town and next to her Aunt Christine, the woman who cared for her as a child and helped her adjust to life at Kalaupapa, the place that became home.