Dr. Marsha Diane Akau Wellein

In 1976, I wrote and published The Endless Summer- An Adventure Story of Guam, a hard-back children’s chapter book (Vantage Press, New York) about 2 CHamoru boys and their summer adventures, now out of print. The intended audience for the novel was youngsters in grades 1 – 5th, but the book was used in various grades (elementary through high school) and in the creative writing classes at the University of Guam. It is bilingual (primarily English with some CHamoru, the native language of Guam) and includes a short glossary of CHamoru words. Continue reading more Marsha Wellein Books FAQs.

In revising the book, I have titled it The Endless Summer-An Adventure Story of Guam, REVISITED, doubling the number of pages from the original 70 pages to 230 pages, enriching character development, and adding at least seven Appendix articles, including an expanded glossary section, and increased the number of illustrations from 8 to 32. The publication date is 2026, on Amazon.com and IngramSpark.

All good things come in good time!! No, actually, I received my Bachelor of Arts degree in 1966 from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, my Master's degree in Reading Education from the University of Guam in 1974, and my Education Doctorate in Leadership from Argosy University in 2010.

However, life gets complicated, and there were the usual issues with money, time, and energy.I raised three youngsters, taught full-time during the day, and I usually also held a part-time teaching job in the evenings. Nevertheless, funds were tight. I began my doctorate in 2005, obtaining it in 2010 when I published my dissertation dealing with the problems that Army Reservists encounter in obtaining higher education (skills, training, certification, or degree). I consider myself a life-long learner.

My philosophy: if you do not make any mistakes, it means you are not doing anything! Just try not to make the same mistakes, the next time!It is never too late for any endeavor you wish to undertake.

Life is full of choices, and you are the sum of all these choices. Everyone faces adversity but it is what you do about the problems that defines you. Each choice has consequences: time i.e., short and long term, months or years; money i.e., costs now or in the future; and effort, i.e., immediate or delayed gratification. All decisions must be weighed, measured, evaluated, and this will help to define who you are at the end of the decision-making process.

No, although I have been told that I can be pedantic sometimes. However, I have held teaching jobs, including special education and advanced placement from pre-kindergarten, elementary, middle & high school, through the undergraduate and graduate levels of college. I have successfully written federal grants, managed the awarded federally funded-education programs, and served as a junior high public school principal.

As a civilian Department of Defense employee, I served as a Guidance Counselor, an Education Specialist, and an Education Director for Army troops in several countries and entire regions (South America, Central America, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and much of Florida). Later, as the Army Reserve Director of Education for Pacific and Asia (representing geographically, 52 percent of the world’s surface), I was responsible for Soldiers’ education in Alaska, American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Japan, Saipan (Commonwealth of the Mariana Islands), and South Korea. I loved the challenges!

It takes work!

I refuse to let obstacles, including biases against certain age groups, religions, national origin, skin color, gender, and/or ethnicity, impede me. I am over 80 years young, a female of Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Native Hawaiian descent, and the youngest of six children. Life is frequently unfair and full of challenges and hardships. It is what you do about these obstacles which helps define you.

My mother Trude Michelson Akau, a true educator and a perpetual writer, a Boston native, who devoted her professional life to teaching, writing, and being a marvelous mother to us six kids.

a. I grew up in Hawaii when it was still only a U.S. Territory, and Hawaii was only granted statehood status while I was in the 8th grade in 1959. In the early 1950s to the 1970s, Hawaii's population grew from approximately 250,000 people in Honolulu to 770,000.

b. As a child, we had no locks or door keys for our house, much like our friends and neighbors. We never even knew that some people actually locked their doors until we finished high school!

c. We also had no medical/health/dental/drug coverage plans, and there were no social service programs, such as Food Stamps, Food Banks, etc. We only saw a doctor during our annual vaccinations. If you got sick, you took aspirin and slept off the fever, and some parents sprinkled sulfa powder on their children‘s bad cuts or scrapes.

d. During our elementary school years, we played outside the house daily until it got dark. We rode our bicycles (no city or state registration required) for hours on the weekends and during summers, straying miles from home. We never used a leash on our dogs, which accompanied us on our jaunts. 

e. At age 5, I distinctly recall riding the public bus (which used overhead electric lines like trollies) alone, from school to home throughout the school year, which involved a bus transfer in the heart of Honolulu, and subsequently walking half a mile daily from the drop-off point to home. My mother told me to tell the bus driver (if I suddenly got sick or lost my dime – for the bus) my name and telephone number so that he could assist me. In those days, people were quite friendly, ready to help each other. In fact, she told me to seek assistance of ANY adult if I needed it! (Boy, were we trusting!) I never heard of anyone being kidnapped or hurt!

f. My two brothers and three sisters and I visited the nearby public library almost daily during the summer months and at least weekly during the school year. I began reading at age 3 and insisted on borrowing a minimum of three library books at a time, much to the surprise of the librarian. (My mother informed the startled librarian that I read every single book I borrowed, and by age 8, it was not unusual for me to borrow 7 or 8 books at a time.)

g. There were no cellular telephones, and the concept of the Internet lay almost 5 decades in the future. Many homes only had a single black rotary-dial telephone for their kitchen with a long, curled accordion-type phone cord. Many telephone lines were party lines, and long-distance calling was a distinct luxury, usually involving a telephone company operator to ‘place the call’. We were lucky to have a tiny black-and-white television set in the mid-1950s, and color television was many years away. I recall answering the telephone one day when my parents were out. The lady who called asked if she could leave a message. I replied, “Yes, of course!” As she began to tell me what to write down, I asked her: “Is the letter F tall or low and made with a cross? And “Is the letter M made with two, three, or four lines?” She laughed, realizing then that I could not write the message as I was only 2 years old.

h. Hawaii had thousands of military personnel assigned there following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. To supplement our family diet, my father brought home many military ‘rations’, such as powdered eggs & milk, large cans of spaghetti, and assorted other food products once the military began downsizing in 1945.Later, when I first tasted real milk and eggs as a teenager, I thought I had gone to heaven!

i. The cost of ‘things’ was truly amazing. Gasoline was under 35 cents a gallon, a milk nickel was literally 5 cents each, a movie ticket cost 10 cents, and double full-length features were the rule. If there was a movie intermission, sometimes a musician played a genuine organ (a feature common in Waikiki movie theaters). My mother purchased over an acre of land for $3,000, and homes that cost $25,000 were readily available.

j. There were few homeless people, aside from a displaced ‘bum’ or two, and most working residents could afford to rent an apartment or buy a home. We had no drug problems (at least none that we were aware of), crime rates were low, and people in general felt safe.

k. Students respected their teachers. If students misbehaved, a stern look from the teacher was all it took to put the fear of God in him or her. Talking during class and chewing gum were simply not allowed. If students ‘got into trouble’ in school, many were spanked or paddled at home and/or lost their meager 25 cents weekly allowance or worse --received as an ‘assignment’ from their parents’ of extra yard work or extra home chores for a month! And we never even dreamed of ‘talking back’ to our parents, elders, or adults!

l. I baked muffins with my sister at age 8 - 9 and sold them by going door to door in my neighborhood, seeking customers. At age 11, I babysat infants as young as 2 months old -- up to and including those even older than I was. For 50 cents an hour, I fed and bathed the children, did the family’s laundry, hung out the clothes to dry on the clothesline, and felt fortunate for the opportunity to earn some spending money, although I usually provided my mother any money I had earned!

m. At the age of 4, my mother was taking master’s degree courses at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I recall sitting under a tree on a lauhala (straw) mat, outside her ‘building’, eating a peanut butter and guava jelly sandwich cut in half, a sliced-up apple, and drinking from a thermos of cold water, patiently waiting for her as I read a book. Occasionally, a student would wander by, stop, then ask: “Where is your mommy? Are you okay?” I would reply: “Oh yes, I have my food and my book. My mom is in class for her degree!” (I never realized until much later, that I had my photo in the daily newspaper that year, with me saying just that!)

As I prepare this article now using my wonderful computer, hooked up to the Internet, with a first-class, heavy-duty printer inside my comfortable air-conditioned home powered in part by my solar panels on the roof, I think of the marvels of the 21st century! We Americans have electric automobiles, cellular telephones, smart televisions, cable and streaming programs, Internet such as Google Search and Google Maps, state-of-the-art appliances, and have gone to the moon and back! I can think of a myriad of other advances in science, medicine, transportation, political processes, civilian and military inventions, state and national economies, engineering, social programs, and education. I think back at the rapid pace of inventions and events that have changed all of our lives since the days I was a little girl, born during the fourth presidential term of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The rate of change makes my head swim!