May 31, 2015
Carolyn’s birthday tapa, which hangs in her dining room some fifty years later.
Some of the souvenirs never got sent home because Jean couldn’t bear to part with them, and this was particularly true of the tapas. She loved the earth tone palettes and the primitive designs. Although she was raised in a quiet suburb of Detroit, she had the bargaining skills of a Turkish vendor setting up shop at the Grand Covered Bazaar in Istanbul, but once she found out how labor-intensive the tapa cloth process was, she felt guilty haggling about price. It didn’t stop her, but she sure felt guilty.
Jean had always had an artistic side but had never had an opportunity to explore it growing up. The uninhibitedness of the island seemed to shake something free in her, and she started printmaking and painting. Or maybe it was the humidity. Either way, her admiration of the tapa design work and skill drove her to not only collect tapas but also to explore her own creative side.
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May 22, 2015
Jean delighted in her tropical wardrobe – girdles were unnecessary and you couldn’t wear stockings with thongs.
The experience of living in an exotic place with a strange new culture was endlessly fascinating to the Broquets, and it was natural for them to want to share it with their family back home. The relatives in Detroit, however, were shoveling snow and dealing with race riots and didn’t have all that much interest in Polynesian tchotchkes. What is a memorable and precious keepsake of a glorious warm day at the beach to one person is just a weird woven fan adorned with dirty chicken feathers to someone whose hasn’t experienced a temperature above 28 degrees for the past six months.
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May 15, 2015
The view from the front of the house. The dog was optional.
Before the decision to NOT to move home had been made, the family had decided to move home. But this move was only 7 miles, from Tafuna into Fagatogo, not 7000 miles back to Detroit. It took almost as long.
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May 8, 2015
Karen knows being the baby is best.
As the months on the island passed and the Broquets came to view Samoa as home, the letters to the family back in Detroit changed. Originally three to four pages long, now they were barely two full pages (unless there was a hurricane, in which case – six pages, single spaced!). Somewhere after the first year, Larry and Jean made a remarkable discovery: carbon paper could cut their letter writing time in half. They were upfront about it to their parents, making sure that each set got one original page and one carbon, as if that somehow justified that they weren’t spending hours on each letter. Larry embraced the concept wholeheartedly, although fully one-third of his letters ended with “Oh hell! I just discovered I had the carbon in backwards again!” Since all the big expository subjects had already been described in the missives of the last eighteen months, the letters now described parties, the children, the weather, and what they had for dinner. And hints. Lots and lots of hints.
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May 1, 2015
An overhead shot of the Pago Pago Intercontinental Hotel, in front of the mountain known as Rainmaker.
The pre-pubescent bathing beauties stood poised around the edge of the pool, equally spaced and smiling fiercely, hands above their heads as they prepared to dive into a production number that would showcase their new swimming skills. They wore matching two-piece white bathing suits patterned with large red hibiscus flowers that had started life as lava lavas.
Chrissie was second to last in the line as she waited for the music cue. She spotted her parents sitting in the crowd and had to stop herself from waving. This was not only her very first water ballet but also her first two-piece suit, and the impulse to tug up the top was almost as strong as wanting to wave. The knot from the halter was digging into her neck but she didn’t dare put her arms down for fear of ruining the tableaux.
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The Samoan Letters 