Life
Kam Fong Chun was born in the Kalihi neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawaii. A 1938 graduate of President William McKinley High School, he worked at Pearl Harbor shipyard in his 20s as a boiler maker and was a witness to the attack by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. After the death of his first wife and two eldest children in 1944, he applied for a job as a police officer at the Honolulu Police Department. He served there for sixteen years. After his retirement from the police force, he worked as a disc jockey and sold real estate in addition to doing community theater.
Chun's life was filled with tragedies. His father had an affair, which led to his parents' divorce and the splitting of the family. The two eldest children went with their father and the younger five, including 7-year-old Chun, lived with their mother. The affair also led to Chun's father being forced out of the family business by his paternal grandfather, which left the family in poverty. Chun watched a brother burn to death as he was painting the family home and someone lit a match. On June 8, 1944, Chun lost his family in a freak air disaster that devastated their home in Honolulu. Two B-24 bombers collided over the Chun residence, killing wife Esther, four-year-old daughter Marilyn and two-year-old son Donald.
Chun later married Gladys Lindo in 1949. They had two sons, Dennis and Dickson, and daughters, Brenda and Valerie.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“One of the important things to learn about parenting is that the more you worry about a child, the less the child will worry about him- or herself....instead of worrying, watch with fascination and wonder as your child’s life unfolds, and help the child take responsibility for his or her own life.”
—Charlotte Davis Kasl (20th century)
“What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what—eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)