Lela Marie Goodell

Born February 10, 1925, Lela Marie Williams was second of 10 siblings born on a farm in Milford, Iowa to Noel and Elvira Williams. She graduated from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, then received a Masters degree in Library Science from UH Manoa, where columnist Bob Krauss chronicled her grad student/mother-of-four efforts. She moved to Maui in 1949 with her husband, Dale Goodell, who fell in love with Hawaii as a Marine during World War II. Lela pursued her love of Hawaiian history through life in Lihue and Kekaha, Kauai, moving into faculty housing at UH Manoa in 1957.

Lela was the first non-missionary descendent hired by the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library on Kawaiahao Street, where she presided over the vault of historic documents for the next three decades. During that time, she was the archivist source for everyone doing research in Hawaii and Pacific history, from James Michener to scores of graduate students from all over the world, some even brought home to stay off and on for years during their research trips.

Lela indexed the Hawaiian Journal of History every year from 1967 to 2001, and after retirement from HMCS Library, she continued to assist Kamehameha Schools and various researchers with their document collections.

Lela was active in the Women’s Campus Club and an avid walker and hiker, going hiking with her pals all over the world.

She is survived by her four children, Dwane Goodell of Vancouver, Washington, Bonnie Goodell of Volcano, Hawaii, Merle and Roger Goodell of Honolulu; grandchildren, Daylen Marie Goodell, Noel Alanson Miller, Joan Louise Miller; sisters, Jean Bruning, Anna Wagner, Ruth McNelly, Margaret Drake; brothers, Wendell Williams, Ronald Williams.

Celebration of Life Service to be held May 21, 2011 at 10 a.m. on the grounds of the Hawaiian Mission Houses Museum.

Memorial donations in her honor may be made to:

• Hawaiian Historical Society, 560 Kawaiahao Street, Honolulu, Hawaii 96813

• Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Library, 553 S. King Street, Honolulu, Hawaii 96813

• Planned Parenthood Hawaii, 1350 S. King Street, Honolulu, Hawaii 96814

BIOGRAPHY OF LELA MARIE GOODELL

Born February 10, 1925, Lela Marie Williams was second of 10 siblings born on a farm in Milford, Iowa to Noel and Elvira Morgan Williams. She was number two, after Jean, and before Ann, Mary, Tom, Paul, Ruth, Margaret, and half-brothers Wendell and Ronnie, born to Noel’s second wife, Jessie Northey. Lela’s mother Elvira died when Lela was 15 years old.

Lela and her best friend and cousin, Veneta (Aunt Lorene, Veneta’s mother, was Noel’s sister), attended Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1944. Lela married Dale Northey Goodell on April 21, 1946, when he returned from World War II duty in the Pacific. (Dale’s mother, Faye (Northey) Goodell, was older sister to Jessie, Noel William’s second wife. The Northey, De Witt, and Williams families were very close, farming adjacent farms and in many ways were one large family, so Lela would have seen a lot of Dale when growing up.

Lela and Dale’s first son, Dwane Lee, was born in Pocahantas, Iowa, on August 24, 1947, where Dale was a County Agent and Lela taught school. Soon after, Dale got a job he had been pursuing ever since training in Hawaii as a Marine – County Agent on Maui. They moved into the sugar plantation “camp” at Waikapu, where Lela learned about cooking rice instead of potatoes. Daughter Bonnie Faye was born there, January 5, 1950. Later that year they moved to Lihue, Kauai, by way of one of their several domestic stays in Faculty Housing at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. In Lihue, they lived in “Mrs. Hogue’s house” near where Missionary descendents, the Wilcoxes lived, and Lela began her love affair with Hawaiian history.

After a year in Saint Paul, Minnesota, while Dale completed his Master’s Degree, they returned to Lihue to live in a small cottage in Ulu Kukui, next door to Alice Gagner, a home economist and adventurer from Montana who became their close friend and, to the kids “Grandma Gagner.” (The Goodell/Gagner ohana continues its tight relationship thru the decades – Alice went off to start the Peace Corp in India in the early 1960s, daughter Betty married Henry Akana of Hilo, and their daughter Allison was hanai to Lela in 1967-8 while she attended Mid Pacific Institute.)

In 1955, after a move to Kekaha Kaua’i where Dale was “on loan” to the Kekaha Sugar Company ranch, in the first of two Kekaha houses, Lela gave birth to the Twins, Merle Glen and Merril Roger.

Other families from “Kauai days” who contributed to the family’s sense of Kaua’i being home were the Takahashis of Kalaheo, Harkers of Poipu, and neighbors Carrs, Frenches, and Watts in Kekaha.

Lela was heart broken to leave Kauai when Dale got promoted to College of Agriculture administration in 1957 and it was back to two additional abodes in UH Manoa faculty housing. Lela took up her studies again, and famously abandoned her toddler twins to ditch their wet training pants and wander naked through various UH lecture auditoriums, greeting professor-neighbors mid-lecture.

During this time, in 1961, Honolulu Advertiser columnist Bob Krauss wrote an In One Ear column about Lela:

Mrs. Lela Goodell, 1607 Keller Road, mother of four, should write a book. This book should be called “Mothers, Solve Your Problems by Going Back to School.”

That’s what Mrs. Goodell did.

She claims that the idea that a married woman has more problems in college than a bachelor girl is hogwash. She has fewer problems now than she did at home.

Mrs. Goodell is the wife of Dale Goodell, assistant director of the University Extension Service. Her oldest son is 14. She’s a full-time student at the University of Hawaii.

For mothers driven frantic by the housewifely grind, here is the Goodell philosophy.

She says that when she went back to college last year she used to be asked at least once a day, “How do you find time to study with a house and four kids/” She has worked out a stock answer.

It is, LEARN TO NEGLECT THINGS!

Like most housewives, she says, she has been doing this on a lesser scale for years. But now she’s more systematic about it. And it gives her an excuse to stop doing things she doesn’t like doing anyway.

“What would I be doing if I wasn’t in school? Cleaning house? Cooking? Playing bridge? Sewing? Heaven Forbid.

“I will tell you how I neatly solved the problem of laundry, for instance. Just before I started school, I sold my washing machine for $5. Now you can see me every Friday night at the launderette.

“I am the haole woman who has to make three or four trips in from the car with laundry baskets. I have four kids, remember, and five beds to change every week and I use up one whole row of washers. But once I get them going all I I have to do is sit there and study!”

Another problem that Mrs. Goodell has solved is that of money.. her solution: BORROW FROM THE KIDS.

“You see, my 13-year-old son has a daily paper route and he makes about $40 a month. So when I get short of money along toward the end of the month, I just borrow from him.

“Lately he has been muttering about raising the interest rates but so far it’s still far below a bank loan.”

Mrs. Goodell has found that, as a married student, she is getting much better grades than she did when she was single. She has an opinion about why this is.

“About a year or so ago I was reading in TIME a quote from a talk somewhere in the east by a University President who said that colleges today have only two real problems. Parking for the faculty and sex for the students. Since my husband is on the faculty and we live near the campus, I don’t really have a parking problem. Neither does my husband. As for the other problem, after being married for 16 years…”

‘One thing a campus wife must have in order to get through college, says Mrs. Goodell, is the help of her husband.

“My husband is most helpful. You see, he travels a lot. Since he took this job in 1957 he has been to the Mainland eight times, mostly on business.

“Also, since there are University Extension offices on all the islands he is always going off to check on them every few months from a day to a week.

“You can see how helpful this is. He gets out of my way and leaves me alone with the kids.

“Look at all the meals I don’t have to get for him! Just recently, during test week, he helped me out by going to Kauai and stayed there until all my tests were over. I was so grateful!

“There are other little ways, too. On Monday and Thursday when the garbage collection truck comes early in the morning, my husband let’s me get up early to put out the garbage to make sure I won’t be late for my 8 o’clock class. Because of this helpful attitude, I have never been late for class on these days since school started…”

I could tell you more but I don’t want to use up too much of Mrs. Goodell’s material before she writes her book.

If you’d like more information, I’m sure she’d welcome hearing from you…since she has so little to do.

By this time, Lela could recite the 16 different places they lived in the first 16 years they were married, and she vowed to buy a house in Manoa and never move again.

They did buy, finally, at 3415 Keahi Street, the house she died in. But she did move one more time, back to Milford for one year in 1963 while Dale pursued doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. Lela used that opportunity to finish her undergraduate degree back at Morningside College, graduating in August 1964.

And then, with all the kids more or less in school, Lela got hired by Sophie Judd Cluff as Assistant Librarian at the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society Museum and Library. She nested right into the vault for historical documents and soon became the collection’s keeper, sorter and defender. The brand new technology of photocopying allowed the American Board of Foreign Mission’s collection in Boston to send copies of all the letters written by the missionaries to their home base, thousands of letters. Lela catalogued that collection for years.

Hiring Lela, from an Iowa farm, was a radical act by Sophie Cluff. HMCS (also called the “Cousins Society’) had never hired a non-descendant to look after their ancestors’ records. In a 1966 article in The Beacon Magazine that Lela saved: “Iowan Lila (sic) Goodell, assistant librarian, rates as an outlander, not a descendant. Sniffs a kamaaina worker, ‘Her ancestors came over on the Lurline.’” On the same page is a picture of Lela and Dale talking behind Ka’upena Wong, the just elected president of the 74-year old Hawaiian Historical Society (which has its own adjacent vault and shares the library with the HMCS.) Ka’upena, grandson of Hawaiian Scholar Joseph Poepoe was the first person of Hawaiian ancestry to preside over the HHS.

She completed her master’s degree in library science from UH Manoa. And in the Library, she nurtured writers and researchers in Pacific history. As soon as she got some of her own kids off to college, and had an empty bedroom, she began befriending penurious graduate students who spent months in the HMCS Library. They also joined the Goodell ohana.

In 1972, Barbara Dunn was hired as Librarian for the Hawaiian Historical Society side of the Library. Lela and Barbara became best friends and co-librarians, continuing for the next two decades to “be” the Library as other staff came and went.

Lela indexed the Hawaiian Journal of History every year from 1967 to 2001, and after her retirement from HMCS Library, she continued to assist Kamehameha Schools and various researchers with their document collections, including the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

Lela was active in the Women’s Campus Club from faculty housing days and an avid walker and hiker, so she and pal Nora Kirkpatrick formed the Women’s Campus Club Hiking Group. They hiked every other week on Oahu trails and made hiking forays all over the world. A few good men joined up, too. And she roped her sisters into the trips; several became regulars. After Lela’s divorce from Dale in 1977, she became a serious traveler, making up for all those trips he took while she stayed home with the kids, but all for fun and hiking.

Dwane married Ruth “Tootsie” Orozco in 1973. They divorced in 1980, but Toots remains part of the family. Dwane married Rebecca close in 1990. Granddaughter Daylen was born June 14, 1991.

Daughter Bonnie married Alan Miller, a missionary descendent through his Leadingham grandmother, in 1978, thus finally bringing Lela into the HMCS fold. Grandchildren Noel Alanson Miller was born September 30, 1981. Granddaughter Joan Louise Miller was born December 28, 1984.

Roger married Ann Harada in 1990.

For her last three decades, Lela enjoyed her friends and family, going to numerous family reunions. For years she hosted her weekly “Sunday Night Soiree” potluck where regulars and visitors enjoyed conversation and then Masterpiece Theatre.

Lela’s son Merle moved in with her in 2001. Over the years they transitioned from mutual assistance to more and more assistance to Lela as she became more frail. She spent one year living with her sister, Margaret in Volcano and then moved back to Honolulu.

For a few years mid-decade, she came back from trips exhausted but determined to go on one more, and then one more. As the decade got older, the other Twin, Roger (Merril) moved in, too, and they were helped as time went on by Bonnie’s daughter Joan.

Lela suffered with bi-polar disorder her whole life, battling crippling bouts of suicidal depression, and trying various treatments with mixed success. But she always managed to keep it from preventing her from enjoying the grand adventure of her life.