Undated photo of David Brede with friend Val Monson, who wrote this remembrance.
David Brede: A personal tribute to one of Kalaupapa’s hidden lives
By Valerie Monson
Special to the Herald
When Kalaupapa resident David Brede died on May 8, there were no headlines paying tribute to one of Hawaii’s favorite sons. David wasn’t one to rally the masses or light up a room with his entrance. When the history of Kalaupapa is told, David Brede will not be among the first people mentioned.
Yet, for me, David will always be a part of my memories of Kalaupapa. He is a man I’ve admired for his determination in the face of adversity that would cause others to crumble.
When I think of David, I think of the Kalaupapa Trail. That’s where I got to know him. When I began visiting Kalaupapa more than 20 years ago, David and I enjoyed hiking the trail for exercise. Sometimes we’d go only partway up, then walk back down. Sometimes we hiked all the way up and back.
David looked like a lifelong fitness buff — he wore black Lycra bicycle shorts, bicycle gloves, a fanny pack and brand-name running shoes. He was slender and strong. When he wasn’t on the trail, he was riding a bicycle around Kalaupapa — a rarity in those days. After our hikes, he would buy me ice cream at Mariano Rea’s bar.
It was during these hikes that I began to know David — that he was only 6 when diagnosed with leprosy and taken to Kalihi Hospital on Oahu; that he was sent to Kalaupapa in 1942 with his older brother, Jimmy, and many other children for safety’s sake after the bombing of Pearl Harbor five months earlier. It was hard imagining children enduring such traumas.
I would learn more about David and his strong inner core after he suffered a devastating stroke in 1992.
The David Brede who hiked and biked and ate ice cream was not the David Brede Kalaupapa residents remembered from earlier years. In those days, he could be belligerent. He could be difficult. Unhealthy living habits were taking their toll, physically and emotionally. His doctors told him he had to change his ways. They recommended a Honolulu support group. David rejected an outside group saying it would view him more as a curiosity than an equal. He announced he was going to get healthy on his own.
The doctors shook their heads and rolled their eyes, but David surprised them all.
He ended his unhealthy ways on the spot. He blazed a new path with zest and energy. He began to eat right and exercise. On one of those first mornings of the rest of his life, while at Leahi Hospital on Oahu, he looked up at nearby Diamond Head and decided he would climb it. After that, every day he could, David would rise before dawn and climb the mountain. He began to feel good. When he returned to Kalaupapa, he started riding a bicycle and hiking the serpentine trail carved into the cliff.
During the first Kalaupapa Walk-a-Fun in 1991 — when everyone in the settlement who was able walked around the peninsula for fun and a bit of competition — David came in third among the men. He had clearly been out for victory. Not long after that, I told him about another “fun walk” in Kaunakakai on topside Molokai. When the starting gun sounded, David left me — and most everyone else — in the dust. He again came in third in his age group and was announced among the winners.
David went back to Honolulu in the summer of 1992 where he had a job cleaning offices across from Leahi. Working on a Friday night, he was looking forward to watching the opening ceremonies of the Barcelona Olympics on TV later that weekend. Then the unthinkable happened. He had a stroke. He tried to crawl to a phone. He managed to reach the door knob, but was unable to turn it. He lay there until Sunday when someone came in the office unexpectedly. David managed to make his presence known by pounding on the floor. He was rushed to the hospital. David had lost all feeling on his right side. For a while, he also lost hope.
Many would have given up after that. Not David. By the fall of 1993, he was living in the historic residential complex at Kalaupapa known as Bay View Home, which has wide porches and long railings stretching the length of the building. Every day he would push himself out of his room in his wheelchair and hoist himself up on the railing and slowly begin his new uphill climb — inch by inch, hand over hand, pulling himself along.
As I watched from afar, sometimes it seemed he hadn’t moved after hours of trying. But he wouldn’t quit. After days, weeks and months of this painfully slow routine, David was clearly improving. He eventually mastered Bay View’s longest railing. It was a bigger accomplishment than making it to the top of Kalaupapa Trail. He helped design a special pedal for a stationery bicycle that would strengthen his weakened right leg and foot. He lifted weights. He became strong enough to ride a three-wheeled bicycle around town. He bought me ice cream again.
David would face more health challenges as the years progressed. Each time, he refused to give up. He did not wallow in pity. He enjoyed complaining about the high airfares and lamented the loss of Royal Hawaiian and Molokai Air. When I last saw him in Honolulu two weeks before he died, he was curled up in bed and on oxygen, but his first question to me was: how much did it cost to fly over here?
David was buried May 20 in Kalaupapa after a service at St. Francis Church.
The histories of most communities are often told through the lives of their dynamic leaders and their big personalities. But for the most part, those communities, Kalaupapa included, are composed of people like David who leave their mark in less obvious ways and inspire us when we least expect it.
Aloha ‘oe, David. I know you are now hiking a heavenly trail with a cool breeze behind you. Someday I hope to walk alongside you again.