Clifford Lee ’70

As an active eight-year-old boy who craved adventure, Clifford Lee ’70 did not find much interest in reading books.
   
Climbing the tangerine tree, however, in the backyard of his grandparents’ Palolo Valley home was a fun-filled pastime he could do all day long. So was eating the tangy citrus fruit right off the branches and slurping the juice right out of the peel.
    
Then one day, an ‘Iolani School librarian introduced the book My Father’s Dragon to him. A world of great literature opened wide as he discovered he had something in common with the young boy in the story.
   
“The word 'tangerine' stuck in my head,” Lee says of his fondness for the tale. “I would climb my grandfather’s tangerine tree and that word popped! I’m eating these tangerines like Elmer Elevator in the book.”
   
My Father’s Dragon was the first book that made a connection to Lee’s own life. He had read the Dick and Jane books in school, but those characters lacked similarities to children growing up in Hawaii. Elmer Elevator, on the other hand, runs away to rescue a flying baby dragon on Wild Island and comes upon the island of Tangerina where tangerine trees grow wild everywhere.

From My Father’s Dragon:
My father was very hungry when he woke up the next morning. Just as he was looking to see if he had anything left to eat, something hit him on the head. It was a tangerine. He had been sleeping right under a tree full of big, fat tangerines. And then he remembered that this was the Island of Tangerina. Tangerine trees grew wild everywhere. My father picked as many as he had room for, which was thirty-one, and started off to find Wild Island.

“Because I could see that connection, and I could see myself eating tangerines like Elmer Elevator was, literature took on a whole different meaning for me,” Lee reminisces. “It wasn’t just words. The words could actually have pertinence in my own life.”
   
Lee imagined himself doing the kinds of things that Elmer Elevator did. My Father’s Dragon (written in 1948 about the narrator’s father) was the first book about a boy that piqued Lee’s fascination in literature. From there, he moved on to comic books.
   
“I couldn’t even remember the plot or the name of the character,” he says. “It’s not those things that were actually meaningful to me in the long run. But it’s the moment that you make the connection between what the character is doing and your own life. I think that becomes meaningful.”
 

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