Lost Generations

"I learned who I was ... at Kamehameha." In 1944, J. Arthur Rath, a part-Hawaiian boy from a broken home, entered the Kamehameha School for Boys as an eighth-grade boarder. Thus began Rath's love affair with an institution that he credits with turning his life around, with giving him and other disadvantaged children of native ancestry--Hawai‘i's "lost generations"--the confidence and support necessary to make something of themselves. This is the story of that love affair. It is also the story of Rath's recent battle, together with other alumni, for the integrity of his beloved Kamehameha against the school's trustees and their organization, the powerful Bishop Estate. In a lively talk-story manner, Rath reminisces about campus life and his classmates, many of whom became lifelong friends and influential members of the Hawaiian community. Years later Rath, a successful retired businessman, would call on these same friends to hold Kamehameha's trustees accountable for their mismanagement of Bishop Estate's vast financial holdings and ultimately their failure to carry out founder Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop's mandate to educate Hawaiian children. Rath draws on his many personal ties to the school and the estate to provide surprising revelations on the trustees and the "Bishop Estate Scandal," which made headlines daily throughout the mid-1990s.