Hawaii is both an imagined escape and a place Perry Smith actually visited. In his account, the islands first take shape as the opposite of his cold childhood in Alaska; years later, Honolulu becomes a stop in his wartime travels and the source of a souvenir among his possessions.

An imagined refuge

As a boy living and traveling with his father, Tex John Smith, Perry learned to hunt and survive in harsh conditions. During nights of intense cold, he imagined Hawaii as a sunny place where people wore grass and flowers. The vision came from a movie he had seen featuring Dorothy Lamour, and stood in sharp contrast to the difficult landscape of his early life.

Honolulu during wartime

Perry reached Hawaii after a dispute with his father, hitchhiking from Anchorage to Seattle and joining the United States Merchant Marine. In 1945, while the war was still underway, he was in a Honolulu tattoo parlor, where a snake-and-dagger design was applied to his left forearm. His account places the visit within a wider period of service at sea, which he said he had liked despite difficulties aboard ship.

A trace among his possessions

Years afterward, Harold Nye found Perry’s stored belongings in a cardboard box kept by a landlady. Among the listed items was a dirty pillow marked as a souvenir of Honolulu. The pillow connects the remembered island and the wartime visit to a surviving object in Perry’s effects: Hawaii appears not only as a childhood fantasy, but as a place whose mark remained among the few possessions he left behind.