Robert and Laura Murakami in an undated photo at a beach park near Hauula.
St. Stephen Diocesan Center, the 20-acre compound tucked below the Pali Highway on the Koolaus’ Kailua-facing slopes, has been home to many — a millionaire landowner, several bishops, numerous priests, dozens of seminarians, missionary sisters, contemplative nuns and others. But the person who lived there the longest, by far, was Laura Haruko Murakami.
Laura resided at St. Stephen from around 1946 until 2012. She died on Dec. 8 at age 92, the last survivor of a particular era stretching back to the early days of the diocese.
Laura was the wife of Robert Murakami, a carpenter’s helper and handyman who in 1946 answered an advertisement for a groundskeeper for the newly opened St. Stephen Seminary.
The Diocese of Honolulu, just five years old at the time, had bought the secluded mountain-side estate from Windward Oahu rancher Harold Castle to be a training ground for its future priests.
The huge property needed tending and the church hired two men to do the work: Ernest Staszkow for indoor janitorial chores and Robert Murakami for the outside. Each came with a wife and, in Murakami’s case, a new family.
Laura, maiden name Takushi, was born in Waipahu. She met Robert after her family had moved to town and leased some farm land in Moiliili, where the Murakamis also had a farm.
In those days, an Okinawan girl marrying a Japanese boy would almost guarantee the disapproval of both families. But Laura was the headstrong type, according to her daughter Jane Tateishi, and also quite pretty. Her father was simply in love.
The seminary job came with a house, quite an attraction for a young couple starting a family. The diocese would have preferred hiring a Catholic couple, but when none came forward, the Murakamis, who were Buddhist, got the job.
The Murakami and Staszkow homes, small wood-frame structures, were the first houses visible on the right to anyone driving down the seminary access road.
The Murakamis saw the seminary through its hopeful but shaky start, its flourishing in the 1950s and early 1960s, and its decline and closing by the 1980s.
Their first two decades there also saw the growth of their own family. They had moved in with their firstborn Allan, and subsequently had Norman, the twins Jane and Joan, and finally Mary Ann.
Jane, born in 1949, described those early years to the Hawaii Catholic Herald, the days before the Pali Highway, when the seminary access road connected to the Old Pali Road somewhere near the present Castle junction.
“Father had to pick up the mail and groceries, and mom dropped us off at school,” she said.
They went to school down in Kaneohe — at Benjamin Parker, Kaneohe Intermediate and Castle High.
Jane remembered the construction of the Pali Highway and tunnels in the mid-1950s. “We used to go up and see the tractors and walk in the construction area,” she said.
She said their “playmates” were some of the priests who made up the seminary faculty, in particular Sulpician Fathers William Thielemann and Richard Cullinan who would take them to drive-in movies and on other excursions.
Potted gardenias
Providing for a growing family on a church salary was difficult, Jane said, so for a while, Laura supplemented her husband’s salary by cleaning homes in Kailua and Kaneohe. The two also grew potted gardenias to sell at Sears, the Garden House, Koolau Farmers and other retail outlets.
Robert Murakami found a soil-mate in Father Cullinan, the seminary assistant rector and science teacher who loved to wield a shovel and sickle to tame the relentlessly encroaching flora. Jane said the two worked “hand-in-hand” around the sizeable grounds.
Laura would always have pupus and Schlitz waiting for Father Cullinan at their house, Jane said. “He always came up for dinner.”
In the 1970s, after the seminary program had shrunk to several college students, Laura was hired to cook for them six days a week in a small kitchen in what was called the college building. After that she cooked for the resident priests in the old Castle house.
After the priests were fed, she cooked for her own family. Jane remembered waiting with her sisters every day for their mother to walk up the road to their house.
“My mom was the life of the family,” Jane said. “I have fond memories.”
The Murakamis gained new neighbors in 1973 when the Carmelite Sisters moved into the nearby convent left vacant by the Marist Missionary Sisters who had provided cooking and domestic help for the seminary.
Laura and Robert helped the Carmelites buy groceries and work in their garden. She also helped the sisters with their cooking.
In 1985, Ida and Alfred Freitas, the retired caretakers of the Catholic Youth Organization camp in Hauula, moved into the Staszkows’ old house. The Staszkows had retired in town.
Robert died in 1992. The late Msgr. Daniel Dever, the Catholic Schools superintendent and longtime resident of St. Stephen, baptized him on his deathbed.
According to Ida Freitas, Robert wanted Laura to become a Catholic too, but had never told her.
Laura did want to be baptized, Jane said, but she wanted to prepare for it properly, learning her catechism. She was instructed in the faith by Msgr. Dever and Carmelite Sister Agnes Marie Wong and was baptized in the Carmelite chapel. Ida was her godmother.
“She was so proud,” Jane said. She went to Mass “365 days of the year.”
Laura was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2006. Her decline was sad and difficult, Jane said, particularly for a person who had savored her independence. She was assisted in her house by her niece and nephew until 2012 when her worsening condition required that she move into a care home.
Around the moment Laura died in Honolulu, Jane, who was in Taiwan at the time, had a vivid dream of her mother enthusiastically greeting her, leaving Jane with the happy realization that she was released from the disease and “finally free to do whatever she wants.”
“She is now with God, with daddy, with Father Cullinan,” Jane said.
Laura was buried next to her husband in Hawaiian Memorial Park in Kaneohe on the side closest to St. Stephen. Father Gary Secor, presiding at the burial, saw familiar names on the next headstone over, names previously unnoticed by the Murakami family — Ernest and Josephine Staszkow.
