“I was raised and born in paradise.” These were the words Ron Dias used to describe his upbringing on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. “I didn’t wear shoes ‘til I went to high school. I was sifting in sand, swimming in the blue Pacific Ocean, and just having a blast!”[1] By the time he was born in 1937, Ron Dias’s family was firmly planted in the Hawaiian sands.
Ron Dias’s lineage begins in Portugal. Ron said his paternal family “sailed around the cape and settled in Lahaina, Maui.”[2] Census reports reveal that Ron’s paternal grandfather, Lino Dias Sr. (1876-1952) married Maria Cordeiro (1877-1946) of Portugal and together they had seven children, including Ron’s father, Lino Dias Jr., born on August 5, 1906.[i] The Dias family hopped from one Hawaiian island to the next throughout the first quarter of the 20th century. As of 1900, they resided on the northern coast of Big Island where Lino Dias Sr. worked as a laborer on a plantation as late as 1912.[3] By 1920, the large Dias family was settled in Honolulu on the island of Oahu.[4] From 1920 on, Lino Dias Senior’s work ranged from a janitor to a theater manager to a painter while his wife, Maria, remained home to raise their children.
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Lino Dias Senior (1876-1952) holding his grandson Ronald
Dias. (Courtesy of Stephen Dias) |
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Maria “Mary” Codeiro (1877-1946). (Courtesy of Stephen Dias) |
In 1926, at the age of twenty, Lino Dias Jr. was listed in the Honolulu city directory as a “helper” at the Hawaiian Electric Company. He would remain in the electrical business in and around Honolulu until the 1950s. Three years later, in June of 1929, Lino Dias Jr. would go on to marry a certain Eva Ferreira of Honolulu.
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| Carolina de Freitas (1876-1923). (Courtesy of Bob Artz) |
The children suffered the brunt of their father’s frivolities, which Ron’s mother recounted to her son many years later. Manuel Ferreira would “put a lock on the refrigerator…and nobody used that refrigerator unless he was there,” Ron shared. “So what one of the brothers did…[was] broke the lock…to feed the younger kids.”[5] The marriage ended in divorce in 1922, and unfortunately Carolina “Carrie” Ferreira would die of illness a year later at the age of 47.[6] Fortunately, Eva Ferreira left these troubles behind upon marrying Lino Dias Jr. in 1929, but she remained close with several of her siblings which led to wonderful childhood memories for her future son, Ronald.
Ronald Lionel Dias was born in Kapiolani Maternity Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii on February 15, 1937 to Lino and Eva Dias, who affectionately referred to him as Ronnie. A daughter, Yvonne Joyce Dias, would come along three years later on October 20, 1940.
Lino Dias Jr. provided for his family as an employee of the Hawaiian Electric Company, but on the side, he played the ukulele, dabbled in art, and was a great admirer of the Tarzan and Prince Valiant comic strips of his time. “My dad could’ve…been an artist,” Ron shared. “I swear, he could draw…Tarzan just like the comic strips.” He continued:
He was just terrific with pen and ink and he would do the most wonderful drawings and wonderful sketches and I have a feeling that must have been a big pull for my, you know, starting to wanna [sic] be an artist…There wasn’t anything [he couldn’t do]. He could’ve been a carpenter. Some of the most beautiful carpentry stuff and carving that he did. And I often wonder what it would have been like he if he had picked something that was more in the art, or toward the art world what would’ve happened for him.[7]
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| Eva
Dias doing the hula (Courtesy of Stephen Dias) |
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| Lino and Eva Dias, 1953. (Courtesy of Stephen Dias) |
Ron was also exposed to his mother’s love of art through song and dance. “She had a wonderful voice,” he said. “She would love to sing and she could dance the hula like crazy. I remember my dad used to grab the…ukulele and he used to play and she would dance.”[8] Eva Dias’s love for song and dance rubbed off on her son, and music would remain an important part of his life. Ron Dias’s second birthday was celebrated in the local newspaper with a picture of him. The caption text beneath described him as “quite an accomplished dancer and singer.”[9] Ron’s love for singing stuck with him into adulthood.
“I stuttered. I stuttered terribly,” Ron shared. “My mom blames the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941…because she said I was fine up until then.” The Dias home looked down on the harbor, and according to Ron, they “saw the kamikazes” along with the flames and clouds of smoke that billowed into the Hawaiian sky.[10] Safety measures on the island called for civilian blackouts in the event of another Japanese aerial attack, and these silent moments in the dark terrified Ron. Overtime, Ron developed coping strategies to combat his stuttering.
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| Ron and Yvonne Dias, circa 1942. (Courtesy of Bob Artz) |
Lino Dias Jr. built a home for his family on their newly acquired land in Kailua, but all didn’t initially go as planned. Ron explained:
…He
purchased this acre of land…that was not built up yet. In fact, in blocks, there was only one house
and then another house and we were like the third house in this big, big area…In
the middle of this property, he and my…Uncle John…built a small, little
house…but what he [Lino Dias Jr.] didn’t realize…[was] my sister, Yvonne, and
myself, would be growing so rapidly that this little house…was too small…So, he
picked up this house, moved it way to the back…and started renting that out mainly
to army couples…because we were very close to the Kaneohe naval air base.[12]
Bob Artz, Ron’s cousin on his mother’s side, shared, “Aunt Eva and Uncle Lionel…were like…the favorite aunt and uncle. They’re the ones you’d love to go visit and they’re always making cookies or something, but Aunt Eva was always making guava jam…They had guava trees in their yard.”[14]
Ron Dias’s personal stories of growing up in Hawaii knew no bounds, and he was always delighted to regale them to anyone who’d listen. One of his favorites was about the time he lost his swimming trunks in the warm waters off Kalama Beach. All day he waded in the Pacific, strategizing his escape after sunset. When darkness settled on Kailua, Ron fled from the waters, scampering from hedge to hedge, until he safely made it back to his home on nearby Kapaa Street. His parents were worried sick, but delighted to see their nude son.[15]
In February 1954, American actress and singer, Ethel Merman, came to the island of Oahu for a much-needed vacation. The event was publicized in the Honolulu-Star Bulletin despite Merman’s insistence on privacy. Her family was offered a home in Kailua to stay for three weeks. Ron and his sister, Yvonne, gathered flowers, made them into a lei, and decided to hand deliver it to the famous performer. As he recounted to his second spouse, Howard Blair, Ron and his sister found out where Merman was staying, knocked on the door, and was greeted with a “Who is it?!” reminiscent of Merman’s loud, abrasive performance from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Merman approached from a side gate that led to the home’s pool. She was wearing a white full-piece bathing suit and beamed upon seeing the two Dias children holding out the lei for her. “Oh, how nice!” she shrilled while they placed it around her neck.[16]
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| Ron
and Yvonne Dias (mid-1940s) in their Kailua, Hawaii home. (Courtesy of Stephen Dias) |
Ron Dias spent much of his childhood playing by himself in his bedroom, tapping into his dreams to create a secret world of magic and wonder. “I liked to decorate…I liked to paint walls,” he said with a laugh.[18] Thanks largely to Lino Dias Jr.’s carpentry skills, and that the electrical company he worked for sold Lionel trains, little Ronnie’s bedroom became his very own wonderland.
His father constructed a
U-shaped train table that took up almost half the room, laid the track, and his
son took over the rest. When Ron got
tired of the train setup, he converted the table layout into a space theme upon
discovering the art of Chesley Bonestell on covers of Collier’s in the early 1950s.
Always supportive of Ron’s creativity, his parents permitted him to
paint his walls black to resemble deep space.
Dangling from his ceiling were planets, rockets, and space
stations. Ron’s concept of scale began
with an early interest in constructing model ships. “I remember putting the Normandy together
that was right down to the little flathead pins for the railings,” he recalled. His sense of scale was applied to every
transformation his room took on.[19]
Ron Dias finished the 1940s out with new viewings of Disney films. Walt Disney’s postwar packaged features, Make Mine Music (1946) and Melody Time (1948), further enhanced his desire to work for the studio one day. Unlike Snow White, these films did not present a single story, but rather many in one. Melody Time was especially unique in its incorporation of the unique stylizations of Disney artists, Mary Blair (1911-1978) and Richmond Kelsey (1905-1987). If only young Ron knew the impact Kelsey would have on him someday.
The Walt Disney Parade was a collection of illustrated Disney stories published in 1940 that Ron’s neighbor happened to have. Whenever he had the chance, he’d run to their house to immerse himself in the book’s illustrations. Conceptual art created by Swedish-American artist, Gustaf Tenggren (1896-1970), for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was included in this book. It was Ron’s first introduction to Tenggren’s work. “And I just loved it,” he said. “I didn’t realize that I was being, way back then, influenced by a person who I didn’t even know…[their] name.” Ron recalled his disturbance upon seeing his neighbor color in the book with crayons. Recognizing that Ron loved the book so much, the neighbor’s father gifted it to him. Battered and beaten over the years, the spine of The Walt Disney Parade was repaired and remained an important part of Ron Dias’s book collection to the very end. [20]
Once the art of Disney was firmly planted within Ron Dias, he couldn’t get enough. A desk area adjacent to his outer space world in his bedroom was no longer for homework, but became Neverland after his viewing of Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). With the excitement growing around Walt Disney’s publicized construction of Disneyland from 1954 to 1955, Ron reinstalled his trainset and created his own Disneyland. Bob Artz fondly recalled his Hawaiian cousin’s enchanted world:
The
thing that was unique about the train table is it was all Disney. One end of it was Never-Neverland and he had
the ocean and he had the islands all set up with Skull Rock, and everything, which
as I recall…he had done with plaster of Paris over a lightbulb…[and] painted
it. He had clouds suspended from the
ceiling around the island with fishing line…and then the train went around to Dumbo
and the circus and he had all of the little buildings, the characters, the
trees…the ladder that Dumbo jumped off.
The whole bit! Then it went into Alice
in Wonderland and you can imagine all the little buildings and stuff and the characters,
and it ended up with Snow White with all the seven dwarfs on the other end…The
train went through a tunnel, which was the mine that the dwarfs were working at
and, you know, every little piece…was done with such care and accuracy and
you’d swear he went and bought [them] from the Disney store but there weren’t
any such thing at the time.[21]
Ron Dias’s love for Disney was even channeled beyond his bedroom. “He would paint the lampshades in the house with Disney themes,” Artz shared. As a child, Bob Artz recognized in his older cousin that Disney was a true passion. “Everything else that he did was Disney, Disney!” Artz said. “He would watch so much of it and copy it so much that it was part of him.”[22] “I always seemed to be having some new Disney thing that I’d be looking at and being enthused with, you know, and wanting to take another step forward just sketching or drawing,” Ron said himself.[23] His step forward began with serious art training in the early 1950s.
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[2]
Ibid.
[3]
“Inter-Island.” The Hawaiian Star,
May 6, 1912.
[4]
Fourteenth Census of the United States:
1920 (Hawaiian territory)
[6]
“Obituaries.” The Honolulu Advertiser, February 4,
1923.
[8]
Ibid.
[9]
“Dancer-Singer.” The Honolulu Advertiser,
March 12, 1939.
[11]
Ibid.
[12]
Ibid.
[13]
Ibid.
[14] Bob
Artz, Interview by Vincent Randle, February 25, 2018.
[15] Ron
Dias, interview by Vincent Randle, September 8, 2012.
[16]
Howard Blair, Phone conversation with Vincent Randle, February 20, 2019.
[17] Ron
Dias, interview by Vincent Randle, September 8, 2012.
[18]
Ibid.
[19]
Ibid.
[20]
Ron Dias, interview by Vincent Randle, January 29, 2011.
[22]
Ibid.
[i]
Ron Dias’s father’s birthname was Lino as confirmed by Stephen Dias, however,
the name Lionel would appear on censuses as of 1940. Lionel became Ron Dias’s middle name.
[ii]
Existing evidence reveals that Carolina de Freitas may have been born in the
West Indies. Ron Dias’s son, Stephen
Dias, shared, “Her family was from Madeira (Portugal), although she was
supposedly born in Jamaica.”
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