Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 3, Number 10, 1 October 1986 — Flying Moved This Hawaiian to Establish Roots on Mainland [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Flying Moved This Hawaiian to Establish Roots on Mainland

Year: ;na to Return Home

Richmond Kaliko Ellis Jr. left home at age 17 following his 1953 graduation from Punahou School and has settled on the mainland ever since. His situation is typicai of the many graduates today, high school or college, who have decided to build their eeonomie base out of the state into another land. Many of them are Hawaiians, including Ellis who is over 60 oercent.

Three Pacific coast states alone — California, Oregon and Washington — have large pockets of Hawaiians employed in various industries. Ka Wai Ola O OHA's mailing labels also attest to the large numbers of Hawaiians living on the mainland. Ēllis, however, said in a recent interview that he is about ready to eome home. He enlisted in the U.S. Manne Corps right out of high school for a four-year hitch. Following his discharge, he enrolled at the Northrup Institute of Technology to study aircraft maintenance and engineering, getting his degree in 1960. It was back into the Marines in March, 1961, "because I wanted to fly ." He was trained to be a pilot by the Navy at Pensacola Naval Air Station. He attended a Navy post graduate school in Monterey, Calif., andreceived a management degree in computer science.

Then eame three years with the Headquarters USMC staff in Washington, D.C. Ellis, an only brother of Office of Hawaiian Affairs Community Kupuna Coordinator Betty Kawohiokalani Ellis Jenkins, flew 360 transport and rescue missions as a helicopter pilot in and out of Vietnam. Besides flying, Ellis' main billet was as an aircraft maintenance officer. He has accumulated over 3,000 hours of flying time on fixed wing aircraft and helieopters. Other missions, all aboard aircraft carriers, were one eaeh in the Philippines and Mediterranean and two in the Caribbean. For the record, Ellis holds the followingFederal Aviation Administration licenses: Airframe and Powerplant meehanie ( A&P); single and multi engine rating for fixed wing; helicopter pilot rating; instrument rating; and commercial pilot rating.

Following his retirement as a Major from the Marines in 1977 after 24 years of service, Ellis went to work for Hughes Helicopters as a data engineer in engineering flight tests. He moved from Carlsbad, Calif., to Yuma, Ariz., as a data engineer and flight test engineer on the Army's Apaehe helicopters. Then followed a year's leave to work for Golden Gate Airlines in Monterey, Calif. , as director of maintenance and engineering. That didn't last too long because Golden Gate went out of business and Ellis rejoined Hughes as engineering flight test director, involving high altitude tests, weapons and inte-

gration testing. It was back to Phoenix where Hughes was bought out by McDonnell-Douglas, makers of the wide-bodied DC10 among its many planes. He is still with McDonnellDouglas where he is currently the liaison for the eompany with the Army at Ft. Hood, Tex. This is the first time the Apaehe is now an operational unit of the Army.

Ellis and the former Karen Sober of Waterford, N.Y., have been married for 30 years. She is one-fourth Mohawk Indian of the Iroquois tribe. They have two children, Richmond Kaliko ID, graduate student in geology at Humboldt State University who was on a field trip in Bishop, Calif. , when the earthquakes struck; and daughter, Charie Nalani, 26, graduateofUniversity of California at Berkeley and currently sales manager of the Embassy Suites Hotel in Phoenix. Ellis says he has tried to eome home about every five years on Aug. 24 to celebrate the same birthday with his late father who passed away July 16.

He is the only son of the now widowed Elizabeth Nalani Ellis, 82, and the only brother of Mrs. Jenkins. Ellis remembers OHA Government and Community Affairs Officer Jalna Keala as also being a member of that 1953 Punahou graduating class. Ellis and his wife make their home in Mesa, Ariz. They are eagerly looking forward to the day when they will permanently change it to Honolulu, Hawaii.

Richmond Kaliko Ellis Jr.

Office of Hawaiian Affairs Trustee Hayden F. Burgess is pictured with some of the people at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations Workshop Sept. 8 at Geneva, Switzerland. To Burgess' left are Mme. Erica Daes (chairwoman of the Working Group), Sir Peter Davis, director of the AntiSlavery Society; and a workshop secretary.