I Love a Parade: Aunty Penny Keli‘i Vredenburg, Mistress of Ceremonies
Standing in front of the fire truck, armed only with her cordless microphone, Penny Vredenburg brings the Waimea Twilight Christmas Parade to a halt. She climbs up on the running board, looks in, then shouts out to the folks along Waimea’s crowded street. “OMG he’s so good looking,” she says with a kolohe (mischievous) smile. “I’m going home and set fire to my house and call you!”
One of her favorite events of the year is the annual parade, which celebrated its 56th anniversary in December. Penny has been one of the MC’s since 2005.
“It’s the second oldest parade in the state,” she says. “This one is wonderful because it is so community-oriented. It is a very dear, very sweet parade. About 30 big rigs are a big part of it.” Festooned with lights and spirited holiday decorations, the trucks chug through town just after dark, much to the delight of hundreds of keiki (children) and families.
“Aunty Penny” has been known to out-heckle hecklers, stop people from tossing candy into the street, and shame litterbugs. “I tell them, ‘if you see rubbish, you own it. If not, I’m calling you out!’” she says.
Penny’s MC adventure started 20 years ago in Hilo with the renowned Merrie Monarch Festival. She credits dear friends John Wray, former KITV producer, Aunty Dottie Thompson, creator of the Merrie Monarch, and longtime friend, Skylark Rossetti, for giving her the chance to MC many local events.
“I used to do lots of events around Merrie Monarch, eight hours on the microphone, all over town,” she says. “From the opening day on Easter Sunday to the parade, the final event of my responsibilities. Did I tell you I love parades?”
Although she never competed on the big stage, Penny is a lifelong hula dancer. Born and raised in Hilo, she first learned from Jenny Naope, Uncle George Naope’s cousin, at the age of three.
“Hula teachers will not take you unless you are toilet trained,” says Penny with a laugh. She later studied with Flora “Tita” Beamer, of the esteemed Beamer-Solomon hula legacy. “She was my absolute idol—sweet, kind,” Penny says. “She used to say ‘dance for me, babies.’” Penny remembers a loving hula teacher, back in the day when the title “kumu” wasn’t used. She was a teacher who gave only gentle correction, never punishment.
Penny continues, “Tita’s mother was Aunty Louise Beamer, and her husband, Uncle Pono, was a songwriter. When she went to Hollywood to teach Shirley Temple how to do the hula, Uncle Pono missed her so much he wrote a song for her, ‘Ku‘uhoa.’ They had the most wonderful love affair. Hawaiians of that era were very demonstrative in their affection for each other. It is a lovely thing to emulate, to live with.”
Indeed Aunty Penny’s life has been a long love story, or a series of stories, about love of family and friends, of her community, of music, people, culture, and home, nurtured first by the love of two mothers.
The daughter of a Japanese woman and an American soldier, Penny says, “I grew up thinking I was half Japanese and half haole. I was adopted by a wonderful haole couple, Mary and Jim Pitman. My birthmother worked for them and they loved her—to the point of sending her through college and eventually producing her wedding to a fi ne local Japanese man—they treated her as their daughter.”
“My biological mother gave me life; my adopted mother taught me to live it,” she says fondly.
That life has included many happy days as a keiki, riding horseback, swimming, and traveling to the mainland for annual family camping trips. She loved the water, and one year for her birthday, she and her father built a small boat from scratch. They painted it gray and red, and she and her friends paddled around the lagoon where the family lived.
Years later, she was privileged to help build the double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a. “Nainoa (Navigator Nainoa Thompson) blessed me saying, ‘you are invited to sail on Hōkūle‘a,’ and I did, many times,” says Penny. “Once you sail on her, you are never the same. She doesn’t sail on the water, she hulas.”
There were kolohe times too: as a young teen, figuring out how to turn the cigarette machine upside-down to make the quarters fall out; climbing out the bathroom window at Kahilu Hall in Waimea to escape the HPA dances and run over to the nearby saimin stand.
“On Chinese New Year in Hilo, people would bring all these beautiful platters of food to the graveyard for their ancestors, and we tried to go every year to eat all the fabulous food offerings,” Penny says. “The last time, we were caught by the police. They took us all to the Police Station and charged us with grave robbing. Most of my friends were from prominent Hilo families, and when they were called to come and pick us up, to say the very least, our parents were NOT pleased!”
She survived an adventurous childhood, and in the late 1960’s moved to Honolulu to model for Nali‘i Fashions, one of the earliest aloha wear designer-manufacturers. Later she applied for a job at Maritz Travel, a large incentive travel agency. “I was a secretary,” she says. “I lied and said I could take shorthand; I lied and said I could type. I got a second-hand typewriter and taught myself and I learned to take the fastest longhand ever!”
Eventually, she made her way into the hotel business. “My sister-in-law Nina Keali‘iwahamana Rapozo (revered Hawaiian music vocalist and daughter of hula legend Vicky I‘i Rodrigues) was Executive Secretary at Hyatt Regency Waikiki. She called and said they needed clerks. In 1976, Hyatt Regency Waikiki opened and I was there. Eight years later, I left as Assistant to the Director of Catering,” Penny says.
She also spent some time in Tahiti, helping with the Kia Ora Resort renovation on Moorea, returned to Honolulu in 1986 and went to work at the Westin Ilikai Hotel as one of their catering managers. “Our ballroom held 3,000,” says Penny. “Hilton Hawaiian Village always had the Hōkūs (Nā Hōkū Hanohano Awards). My boss said ‘Do you think you can get that event over here?’ I said ‘yes.’”
Her good friend, Marlene Sai was the President of Hawai‘i Academy of Recording Arts, parent of the Hōkūs. Penny helped them plan a special dinner at the Ilikai. She says, “It was Marlene’s birthday, so I ordered a cake. Suddenly, in comes the cake. The waiters lowered the lights. Marlene was shocked. We sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ had a couple bottles of champagne… and I said, ‘Goofy (that was Marlene’s nickname), you know I really am pitching for the Hōkūs to come to the Ilikai.’ I went on my knees. ‘And I’m not above groveling! ’And yeah, we got it.”
In her Honolulu years, Penny got to know celebrities like the Cazimero Brothers, Frank DeLima, Mihana Souza, Jerry Santos, Tony Conjugacion, The Makaha Sons, and many more. Her good friend, newspaper reporter Ben Wood, would occasionally mention her in his social column, sometimes describing her humorous nature, like the time she used two kitchen whisks as pū‘ili hula implements.
But that was only part of her story. At the same time, Penny was raising her pre-teen daughter, Lisa and two hānai children. “I was a single mom, and the hānai kids were Jewish,” Penny says. “Every Friday we went to synagogue, and every Sunday they came with me to St. Andrews. I wanted them to know their heritage. That was my duty, my obligation… I had them write letters to their mother once a month and send them with a Polaroid picture. They were good, good kids. I am proud of all they have become today.”
For her own two mothers, Penny was able to help at the end of their lives. “My biological mom had Alzheimer’s,” Penny says. “I told my brother who was caring for her at his home in Iowa, ‘Bring her home to me. When she doesn’t remember you and doesn’t remember me, she’ll remember her long ago comfort foods, like pork tofu and miso soup.’ She remembered us both right ‘til the end.”
“I was privileged to have a large home,” she continues. “And I was honored to be able to take care of both my mothers during their last years—at separate times of course. My mothers were relatively easy to care for and I was able to experience some awesome times with them in those waning years. Most importantly, when they passed they knew absolutely that they were loved.”
One “lighter” memory of this difficult time had to do with her birth mom’s incessant smoking. Penny was deathly afraid she’d start a fire and cringed every day when she’d light up. “One evening before her bedtime, I took her pack of cigarettes out of her purse,” says Penny. “The next morning she looked for them, then asked me and I replied, ‘Your cigarettes? Why, you stopped smoking five years ago!’ She looked quizzically at me and never asked for them again! I was going to make that damnable disease work for me.”
After her birth mother passed, Penny searched for her biological father on the internet, found him in Oklahoma and asked to come and meet him. In 2001, she met up with her half-brother (same mother) Bruce, on the mainland and they drove to Oklahoma together.
“I had the address, found the street. It was a cul-de-sac.” Penny says. “The front door opened hesitantly, and there was this tall, handsome man. He started to come out to see us, and from behind, his three sons pushed out ahead of him. They were all so handsome. Dang! They were my half-brothers!”
“One of them asked me, ‘Did our father know you were born?’” says Penny. “I told them ‘yes, but don’t be angry. This was a different time in society. He impregnated an American-Japanese woman and he had to go home and make a new life for himself. Don’t hate on him.’”
One of her first questions to her father was about his ethnic background. “He had this Oklahoma accent that could make a one-syllable word into two or more. He said ‘Way-ull, I’m half Chickasaw and half white,’” says Penny. “It stunned me, I was a quarter Chickasaw. People assumed I was part Hawaiian.”
With so much aloha in her life, and in her stories, that would be easy to assume. And in 2003, a new love story began for Penny, when she met Dexter Keawe‘ehu Vredenburg. Recalling Uncle Pono’s loving relationship with Aunty Lou, she compares the memory with her present life.
“My husband and I follow that,” she says. “We got married later in life, and we focus on each other. We came (together) without a lot of baggage. Unconditional sweet, and a very strong love.”
Although Penny knew his brother Gordon in high school, Dexter “Keawe,” had already graduated and left for college. “I didn’t know him from Kimo’s housecat,” says Penny.
Many years, adventures, and a few relationships later, their paths would finally cross. “I was having a pre-class reunion party at our house in Hilo,” says Penny. “Gordon flew in from Sacramento with his wife, and he picked up his brother in
Honolulu. I met Gordon at the door and asked ‘Who is this?’ He says, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you I was bringing my brother with me.’”
She was impressed. “He had a very swift, very dry sense of humor that enchanted me and his wicked brilliance, was like a walking encyclopedia… I was totally charmed and attracted to him.”
At that time, Penny had raised three children as a single, working mom and enjoyed an independent, unmarried life. “I had been divorced 25 years and wasn’t going to do that again,” she says. “I had boyfriends, but as soon as they would say ‘let’s get married,’ I’d say, ‘WHY?’”
Over the next few months, Keawe made several visits to Hilo to see her. “One time, we were having dinner at Uncle Billy’s (former Hilo Bay Hotel), and he said ‘Will you marry me?’ and I heard myself say ‘Yes,’ and I thought ‘Who said that?!’ It was love,’” she recalls. The two were married in 2004 at ‘Imiola Church in Waimea, which Keawe’s grandfather helped build.
On her wrists are Hawaiian bracelets, four gold and four silver. One says, “Only love endures.”
With enduring love, enthusiasm, and endless gratitude, no doubt Aunty Penny will host many more wonderful events before her parade passes by. When you see her with her microphone, at a concert, parade, or various events wherever her journey takes her, please take a moment to soak up a little of the very special and very strong, deeply-rooted aloha she has to share. “Love isn’t love ‘til you give it away,” Penny says. ❖
Photos courtesy Penny Vredenburg, Sarah Anderson
Contact writer Catherine Tarleton: catherinetarleton@gmail.com
Contact Penny Vredenburg via facebook.com
