Go, See, and Do: An Adventure

By W. Davis Hawkins

A lifelong adventurer shares his fascinating story in this memoir of travel, life in Japan, and special assignments from the White House.
 
Davis Hawkins lives a life of adventure and travel, approaching each opportunity with the mantra to “Go, See, and Do.” He chronicles his life through this lens, starting with his southern California upbringing before moving to Japan at an impressionable age. He experienced a changing America and East Asia landscape in the mid-twentieth century living abroad. These moments impacted his life through his military service and directed him to a successful financial and consulting careers overseas. 
 
Hawkins continued traveling, embracing any opportunity to visit different cultures. He visited more than eighty countries spanning all seven continents, finding human shrunken heads in Borneo, trekking in the Himalayas and the Amazon jungle, camping in the Gobi Desert, dining at the US State Department, couriering for the President of the United States, receiving a US congressional subpoena, surviving a military coup, and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781635766868

Book preview

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Personal Memoirs

Davis Hawkins lives a life of adventure and travel, approaching each opportunity with the mantra to Go, See, and Do. He chronicles his life through this lens, starting with his southern California upbringing before moving to Japan at an impressionable age. He experienced a changing America and East Asia landscape in the mid-twentieth century living in Japan. These moments impacted his life through his military service and directed him to successful financial and consulting careers overseas. He continued traveling, embracing any opportunity to visit different cultures. He visited over 80 countries spanning all seven continents, finding human shrunken heads in Borneo, trekking in the Himalayas and the Amazon jungle, camping in the Gobi Desert, dining at the U.S. State Department, couriering for the President of the United States, receiving a U.S. congressional subpoena, surviving a military coup, and much more. In retirement, he reflects on his expatriate journey, hoping to pass down his stories to his descendants just as his ancestor’s stories were told to him. It is through his tales that he wishes to keep his family heritage alive, with a few shocks, insights, and laughs along the way.

W. Davis Hawkins, JR. is a graduate of Stanford University with later MBA studies concentrated in finance. He authored two books: Soviet and Communist Chinese Influence in Asia and Japan’s Role in Asia. Both were published by the government in the early 1970’s and are classified Secret. Having lived on the east and west coasts and fourteen years in Asia, Davis now resides in Hawaii. He wrote Go, See, and Do firmly believing there is significance in every family’s history.

Go, See, and Do

An Adventure

W. Davis Hawkins Jr.

Radius Book Group

New York

Distributed by Radius Book Group

A division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

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New York, NY 10016

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Copyright © 2019 by W. Davis Hawkins Jr.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval, without the written permission of the author.

For more information, email [e-mail].

First edition: November 6, 2019

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63576-697-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-686-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019909113

Cover design by Mark Karis

Interior design by Scribe Inc.

Radius Book Group and the Radius Book Group colophon are registered trademarks of Radius Book Group, a division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

To Maggie and Josie,

may you live in interesting times and have the ability and serendipity to capitalize upon them

Maggie and Josie smelling cherry blossoms in Kyoto Japan, April 2019

In memoriam

To Melinda and George, thank you for your friendship and the good times we shared

Contents

Introduction

Family Heritage

Early Years

Japan: 1960–64

California / College: 1964–69

Army / Hawaii: 1969–73

Banking: California, Japan, Korea, New York

Consulting: Warren Management, Spencer Stuart, Korn Ferry

Retire to Hawaii / Federal Investigations

Adventures from Hawaii

Hobby: Personal Finance

Retirement

Life’s Lessons

Epilogue

Introduction

Have you ever jumped off a cliff at night; or hiked while carrying dynamite; or swum with dolphins in Hawaii, jellyfish in Japan, and sharks on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; or been teargassed on two separate continents; or traveled to more than eighty countries spanning all seven continents; or starred in a live television series and a movie; or performed on stage in Harlem, the Caribbean, and Hawaii; or explored a huge cave in Borneo with a half million bats flying overhead; or trekked in the Himalayas and the Amazon jungle; or lived in a yurt in the Gobi Desert; or seen real shrunken heads; or observed a nude, dead body; or broken bones; or had surgery with a cloth soaked in ether as the anesthesia; or received a subpoena to appear before Congress in Washington, DC; or flown at twice the speed of sound on the Concorde multiple times; or taken three months’ paid corporate leave and traveled around the world? If not, welcome to my world.

Have you ever taken your spouse to Vietnam for vacation during the war; or hunted vampires in Transylvania; or smelled the sweet, pungent aroma of an opium den; or kissed the Blarney Stone; or shaken the hands of billionaires; or determined that you prefer eating scorpion to sea horse; or dined on dog; or drank warm blood straight from a cow in Africa; or spent Christmas Eve being entertained by belly dancers in Istanbul; or taken an eleven-and-a-half-hour local bus ride from Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Bangkok; or crawled through the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam; or climbed Mount Fuji three times; or had a top-secret security clearance and carried a federal badge; or explored a cave ninety feet underwater in the Bahamas; or had dinner at the State Department in Washington, DC; or taken hot air balloon rides over the Masai Mara and the Serengeti jungles; or loaded the barrel of a tank with live ammunition; or delivered a briefing in Japanese to American and Japanese generals? If not, welcome to my world.

Have you ever been a courier for the president of the United States; or been in a car where the driver ran over someone and kept on going; or been mugged on a street in Madrid; or bribed someone; or flown an airplane; or been inside more than one prison; or walked through a former minefield; or lived through a military coup; or packed up and left the country and your job with no notice; or seen how M&Ms are made; or testified before a state House Finance Committee; or driven slowly over thousands of crabs migrating across the road at night; or lived for fourteen years on the other side of the world; or paddled a rickety dugout canoe in a jungle river infested with crocodiles; or been attacked by flesh-eating fish; or hiked across an active volcano; or been tortured; or won a Caribbean cruise for the best costume at a party of 250 people in Cancún, Mexico; or called the Pentagon and asked to be excused from the Vietnam War; or been interviewed by spies? If not, welcome to my world.

Even as a child in Southern California, I embraced adventure. I would take long hikes by myself in the Angeles National Forest, which is adjacent to La Canada (later named La Canada Flintridge), where I grew up during my grade-school years. While in the Boy Scouts, I hiked a mountain in Japan, and I always wanted to know what was on the other side of that mountain, so I would urge my group to postpone making camp to find out. Of course, on the other side of the mountain was another mountain. Perhaps my search for adventure was accentuated due to my living in Japan at an impressionable age in the early 1960s. Everything was new and exciting. It was then that I developed my life plan to go, see, and do.

While I never became a hero adventurer who conquered far-off places, I have been willing to explore new venues, cultures, and opportunities. In doing so, I have had many people over the years encourage me to write a book. This is my attempt to capture some memories that hopefully might be of interest to future family members curious about their heritage.

As the Roman philosopher Seneca once said, Life is a voyage in the progress of which we are perpetually changing our scenes from childhood to old age. That was the opening line of a speech I gave my sophomore year in high school at the Canadian Academy in Kobe, Japan. I went on to compare life’s journey to a voyage into space: the environment is always changing, you will need to adapt to survive, and the future is unknown. Life is an adventure. Take advantage of the experiences and learn along the way.

Family Heritage

My father, Wayne Davis Hawkins, was born on December 2, 1920, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a Mormon family headed by my grandfather, Clarence James Hawkins, and grandmother, Josephine Groo (née Davis) Hawkins. Grandfather Clarence was a music professor at the University of Utah and led concerts in Liberty Park, Salt Lake City. My mother, Charlotte Louise Swaner, was born on January 27, 1920, in Salt Lake City to a non-Mormon family headed by George Baddeley Swaner and Charlotte Louise (née Bothwell) Swaner. My grandmother Charlotte came from a well-to-do family with land and gold-mining interests. My grandfather George was apparently a good-looking but motivationally challenged fellow. My recollection of my grandparents on my mother’s side is limited because they died when I was young. I remember Grandfather George bringing me gold-colored Arabic slippers with curled-up toes from a recent trip he had taken to Egypt. He died in his sleep in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Going back into family genealogy on my mother’s side, Eleazer Bishop was born in England in 1669. At the age of seven, he was kidnapped by the crew of an English ship from the Isle of Jersey and brought to New London, Connecticut, in 1676. Mr. Dart, a rich farmer living in New London, paid the shipmaster a yoke of oxen for young Bishop’s passage and took the lad home. Eleazer lived with Mr. Dart until he was twenty-one, when he married Mr. Dart’s daughter. When they were wed, Mr. Dart gave Eleazer several hundred acres. Eleazer’s son, Nicholas, was born in 1723. He became a captain in a company that marched to the rescue of Boston in Colonel Samuel Holden Parsons’s regiment. Nicholas died on July 30, 1780. His son, John, was born in 1768 and died in 1805. John’s son, Levi, was born in 1794 and died in 1882. One of Levi’s many children was a daughter named Charlotte, born in 1823. Charlotte married Alek Bothwell in 1858.

Alek Bothwell was born in Groton, New York, and was educated at Groton Academy. In 1859, he and Charlotte moved to Illinois. He died on his farm in Rochelle in 1913. Charlotte and Alek had several children, including a son born in 1861 named Glenn. Glenn married Jessie Edith (née Glenn) Bothwell, who was born in 1861 and died in 1929. Jessie was a direct descendant of Alexander Adams, a gunner in the US Navy in 1777. She was also a direct descendant of William Williams, a blacksmith who emigrated from Wales and who supplied guns to George Washington in Pennsylvania during the Revolution. William’s daughter, Nancy, was born in 1760 and married Alexander Adams. Their daughter, Rachel Adams, was born in 1788 and married George Knox Glenn Sr. Their son, George Knox Glenn Jr. (1811–92), married Sarah Hartsock (1806–50), and their son, Henry Hartsock Glenn (1833–1914), moved from Pennsylvania to Illinois. Henry H. Glenn married Elizabeth Grazier (1832–1914), and their daughter was Jessie Edith (née Glenn) Bothwell. Glenn and Jessie had seven children, including a daughter named Charlotte Louise, my grandmother, who was born in 1892 in Salt Lake City. Charlotte married George Baddeley Swaner, my grandfather, in 1917. George Swaner’s mother was from Denmark. They had five children: Robert, Charlotte (my mother), Pete, Patricia, and Mitch. It is interesting that the family has heritage back to the Revolutionary War.

My parents dated in college at the University of Utah, from which they both graduated. Dad began college at age sixteen and earned a five-year chemistry degree by age twenty-one. Mom later earned a master’s degree in social work. Dad graduated top of his Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) class in 1942, earning him entrance into the newly established Army Air Corps. He served in North Africa and Italy under General Eisenhower, rising to the rank of major. After the war, he returned to California, where my mother had been working in the defense industry.

Early Years

I was born on January 8, 1947, in San Mateo, California. We lived there for two years in a small home to which my parents moved after World War II. When I was in high school and long after we had moved away, my father took me to see the house. At that time, however, the area had become a clean, well-maintained African American community. This somewhat surprised my father but reinforced another theme I have learned: the only thing constant in life is change. Other events in 1947 included the deaths of Henry Ford and gangster Al Capone, Jackie Robinson playing his first major league game with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Mahatma Gandhi marching for peace in East Bengali. In 1947, a fourteen-ounce bottle of Heinz Ketchup cost fourteen cents.

When I was two, we moved to Arcadia in Southern California, where we lived until we moved to La Canada in 1950 or 1951. To my recollection, the 1940s consisted of a dog and a swing set. The home at 1308 Olive Lane, La Canada, was larger than our Arcadia house. Years later when I visited the Olive Lane house, I realized it was really rather modest. Nonetheless, it held many happy memories, including listening to the Everly Brothers on a crystal radio set and watching Elvis Presley’s Ed Sullivan Show performance on a black-and-white television with only twelve channels and no remote. Dad and I would take the tubes from our TV set down to the Alpha Beta supermarket to test them. Ones that didn’t work were replaced.

We had one black (the only color available) landline rotary telephone owned by the telephone company for which we paid monthly rent; no one owned their own telephones. If one took the phone off the hook to make a call and heard voices already talking, one would politely hang up and wait for the neighbors who used the same line to finish. This was known as a party line, a telephone circuit shared by multiple users, often because demand for telephone usage outstripped the number of lines available from the telephone company. I remember that my telephone number in the early 1950s was SYO-4317. The SYO stood for Sylvan. Funny I should recall it. Back then, all we had were black rotary phones with letters and numbers, similar to what we have today. We did not have area codes. If one wanted to place a long-distance call, one did so through the operator.

I also remember contributing some money to the March of Dimes campaign against polio, fearing that I might succumb to the virus and be placed in an iron lung, as had already happened to many children my age at the time. Other memories include duck-and-cover drills at school, where we would go under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. The Arden milkman, dressed in a white uniform and driving a white truck, would deliver bottles of milk in the morning. The milk was not homogenized, so a layer of cream would be at the top, just under the heavy paper bottle top. As I grew older, I played Little League baseball and dressed as Cuckoo the Clown to entertain children at birthday parties with puppet and magic shows and games.

Perhaps some of my fondest memories were in La Canada playing with my pet goats, Herman and Lucile. We had just over an acre of land, consisting mostly of trees and weeds, and Dad’s solution was to buy two baby goats to eat the weeds. Herman eventually stood six feet four inches on his hind feet, with horns more than a foot long. Whenever he got loose, Dad was the only one who could corral him. We would stake the goats in different areas around the yard so they could eat the weeds. Herman and I had a game we would play. I would grab his horns and push him away with all my might. He would then rise up on his hind legs, towering over me, and return to the ground just in front of me to butt me, allowing me to grab his horns to push him back again. He never hurt me. Lucile, his sister, was much gentler. Other fond memories were of the many hikes I took in the mountains behind La Canada. On one such hike, I encountered a rattlesnake. I’ll never forget the sound that rattler made shaking its tail. On another hike, my friend and I found nine sticks of dynamite, and we carried them back to his house. His mother immediately called the police. The police admonished us sternly, citing how dangerous it was to have carried the dynamite back to the house. Live and learn.

The first bad word I ever said was damn. I didn’t know it was a bad word; I just thought it was used as a sort of exclamation. I was informed, however, by a girl across the lunch table at La Canada Elementary School that I should not have used it. After school, I went home and told my mother about the confrontation, and she told me that indeed the word should not be used and then asked me where I learned it. I told her I learned it from my father while he was working in his workshop in the garage. That resulted in another conversation with my father.

My sister, Holly Charlotte Hawkins, was born on July 23, 1951. Family vacations in the 1950s consisted of camping trips with other families with children about our age. Perhaps these camping trips were the genesis of my interest in adventure. We camped high in the Rocky Mountains, on sand dunes in Death Valley, by ice-cold streams in the redwood forest, and in sight of the ocean off Route 1 near Big Sur. My most memorable camping trip was to Monument Valley, then the least-explored area in the country, as Alaska was not yet a state. It was the first time I encountered a different culture, the Navajos. We brought oranges, difficult to find in the Four Corners desert, with which to trade. I was mesmerized by their quiet, stoic presence at the trading post and in awe of their knowledge of the environment.

The youngest of our group of several families was Kathy Moore. She wandered away from camp, apparently following a dirt road that she thought would lead her back to camp. Instead, she became lost quite a distance away. Her parents were frantic, and we all set out to search for her. Bloodhounds were flown in, and a Native American school was let out so its students could join in the hunt. Finally, a Native American informed the parents that Kathy had been found. Perhaps half an hour later, another Native American pulled up in a truck with Kathy. He had tracked her from the camp along the road where she was ultimately found. How did the Native American who told Kathy’s parents know that she had been found? There were no telephones or means of communication out in the desert. It still remains a mystery.

The only other near calamity occurred when a friend and I tried to take a shortcut and found ourselves trapped on a cliff of crumbling sandstone. We were unable to climb back up and did not want to fall the rest of the way. A rescue team was able to retrieve us by repelling down the cliff and pulling us back to safety. In addition to embarrassment, I experienced the ignominy of having sat on a cactus during our attempt to steady ourselves on the ledge. I learned that while the shortcut idea had vision, one must be able to execute the vision to achieve success. I also learned that shortcuts are not necessarily the shortest means to an end.

While Dad was on a trip to San Francisco in 1958 or 1959, a serious forest fire broke out in the mountains where I liked to hike. People closer to the mountains were being evacuated, and we were only one street away from evacuation ourselves. Black ash rained down on our house. Mom loaded the car with essentials, including Holly; her cat, Tsong; and my nascent coin collection, while I manned the garden hose, watering down our wood-shingle roof. Anyone who has been in or near a natural disaster knows how scary it can be. Fortunately, the fire was contained before we had to evacuate.

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1959, Dad, a chemical engineer,