Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Here's Hawai'i | May/June 2004

Under the Hula Moon

The Life That Keeps on Giving

Anna Sloggett at home in Lihu'e, in her backyard greenhouse. PHOTO BY BRETT UPRICHARD

When the Kaua'i Museum honored schoolteacher Anna Sloggett as a Living Treasure in 2002, she was 95, and the program was highlighted by fond recollections of former students. The stories, as recounted by her son, David Penhallow, told of how their third- and sixth-grade teacher had influenced their lives in the classroom and long after, as she continued to teach with her spirited living.

As a teacher at Kapa'a and Wilcox Elementary schools on Kaua'i, she gave up her lunch for students who forgot theirs. Sometimes she would take an athletically challenged third-grader by the hand and, running the bases with him, teach him beginner's baseball. She had 8-year-olds writing and producing plays. She would take her students on memorable excursions that would enrich their lives, places such as the post office, fire station, police department, sugar and pineapple factories, interisland piers and Waipahe'e Falls. Prolific students who wrote enough book reports got invited to her house, where they could play with her dachshund, Tinkerbell, and listen to her cuckoo clock. "She never dwelled on what you couldn't do, only what you could," says a former student. "I never had a bad day in class with her."

Nor did I, as one of her third-graders at Kapa'a Elementary School, where Sloggett taught for a large part of her 31-year career. She and the late Gladys Brandt, the fearless and feared school principal, were an unforgettable force-stern with their students, but wickedly funny, given to parties and merriment off campus, but only after they, and we, had left the school. With Grace Buscher Guslander of the Coco Palms Hotel, they formed a gutsy, fun-loving trio-consummate professionals who never lost their humor and irreverent edge. They were ahead of their time, the first prominent, progressive women of Kaua'i.

"I was trained to teach kindergarten through sixth grade, but third grade was my favorite," Anna says. "My students called it 'turd' grade." She erupts in her throaty, trademark laugh, her blue eyes flashing with mischief. "I was lucky to teach. Those days, girls who wanted to work had a choice of being a nurse or a teacher, and I love kids." As the granddaughter of William Hyde Rice, the last governor of Kaua'i under Queen Liliu'okalani, and once a teacher at prestigious Punahou School, she had other academic choices. However, she says, she always preferred the ethnic and cultural diversity of public schools.

Now, months away from her 98th birthday, she drives a forest-green Honda SUV and takes champagne and birthday cake to her younger friends. At her inviting plantation home in Lïhu'e, sitting on her trellised lanai surrounded by ferns and orchids, listening to the chirping of shama thrushes and cardinals, I ask for a verbal snapshot of her daily life.

"I wake up at 5:30 a.m. and feed my canary, which is named Elvis," she says. "On Monday, I play nine holes at Wailua Golf Gourse, on Tuesday, I play Rummikub [an indescribably mind-boggling game], on Wednesday, I get my hair done." Thursdays are given to duplicate bridge, Fridays to another round of golf and to contract bridge and Saturdays to yard work. Sundays begin with a visit to All Saints Church and end with a movie and supper with her son. For her 97th birthday, Sloggett braved an inner-tube ride down a flume in Hanama'ulu. "My advice for a good life is to stay busy, involved and interested," she reflects.

Some things fell away over the years. She gave up cigarettes at 80 and bourbon sometime later. There were three husbands-David Penhallow, whom she divorced, Herbert Bishop and Dick Sloggett, both of whom she outlived. Her daughter, Marion Penhallow, a former college administrator and vice president of Kaua'i's Wilcox Hospital Foundation, raises Bouvier des Flandres dogs near Hilo. Her son, David, is working on his third book, The Story of the Coco Palms Hotel.

On this day, Anna shows me the pages of a booklet she wrote when she was 80. It describes how the 1906 San Francisco earthquake drove her mother, Mary, wife of Walter Scott and the daughter of Kaua'i's former governor, to the safe shores of this garden island to give birth. In this way came Anna Charlotte Scott Sloggett to Kaua'i, to plant the seeds of a rich life with many more chapters to come.

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