Eleanor Nordyke (born Eleanor Louise Cole) passed away on January 17th 2014 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
She was born on June 15th 1927 in Los Angeles, California.
As most readers already know her twin daughters were born at Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 5th 1961. You can view their birth certificates here:
Susan Elizabeth Nordyke (Bell) and Gretchen Carter Nordyke (Worthington)
Eleanor also went by the name Ellie. She earned a five-year nursing degree at Stanford University in 1950. She married Robert Allan Nordyke on June 18th 1950.
Eleanor was similar, in many ways, to Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama’s mother). For example, Eleanor was adventurous and she too traveled to Africa.
Eleanor traveled to Africa (and even worked there to help further finance her travels) in her early twenties and she did so on a shoestring budget.
This was approximately ten (10) year before Obama’s mother made her way to Kenya where her son Barack Hussein Obama II was born.
After Eleanor married Robert Nordyke she suggested to him that they take off for an entire year to travel around the world.
They decided that they first needed to save $2000. They decided to pull double and triple work shifts. After they’d saved the said amount of money they headed off to Europe, Africa and the rest of the world.
Eleanor (Ellie) and Robert (Bob) visited all over Europe on a budget of two dollars ($2) a day.
They also traveled to Africa and while they where there they worked for three (3) months at a United States Air Force base (Nouasseur Air Base) in Casablanca which at that point in time was located in what was called the French Protectorate in Morocco.
After three months of work in Casablanca they continued their trip around the world.
Eleanor Nordyke’s obituary, which doesn’t mention anything about her time in Africa, can be viewed at the following two links. It appears that Hawaiians share something in common with Kenyans, they both seem to have a penchant for misspelling names:
Elanor (sic) C. Nordyke – January 26th, 2014 – Honolulu Star-Advertiser
Eleanor Cole Nordyke – February 12th, 2014 – Honolulu Star-Advertiser
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Eleanor and the Explorer
Hana Hou! – The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines
by Lisa Simon
Vol.12, no.6, December 2009 / January 2010
Excerpt:
It was the 1930s when Eleanor Nordyke, a little girl on a family excursion, boated across Kealakekua Bay to visit the monument erected in memory of Capt. James Cook. The explorer had been killed in the bay in 1778, Eleanor learned, but not before he had undertaken three epic voyages and circumnavigated the world. Back home in Honolulu, an intrigued Eleanor studied up on Cook’s legacy in her parents’ large library. Cook’s voyages had brought societies into contact with one another, the books taught the curious girl, but they’d also introduced deadly disease and—as Cook’s demise itself illustrated—colossal cultural misunderstandings.
Now 82, Eleanor sits in her Manoa house, just a few doors from her childhood home and still surrounded by books on Cook. More than seventy years on, she is now a bona fide expert on the explorer’s life, and she is full of intriguing facts about Cook and his times. For example, she utterly discounts the idea that Cook was the first non-Polynesian in Hawaii. She points to boxes of evidence stacked up in her living room, filled, she says, with clues about numerous other foreigners who arrived before Cook: perhaps from Belgium, Spain, Portugal or other European nations or from Japan or China.
If Eleanor believes Cook wasn’t the first, all the more reason for the question: Why her lifelong fascination with the explorer? She smiles and notes that, to begin, he was a remarkable scientist. He entered life with nothing, the son of a farm laborer, yet managed to rise through the ranks of the British Navy and become the most famous sea captain of his day—no easy feat in the England of King George III. His mastery of mathematics, geometry, astronomy and other fields of inquiry made him the finest navigator of eighteenth-century Europe.
“He was a meticulous cartographer. He could pinpoint the location of his ships,” says Eleanor. “Let me show you his map.” She pulls it out and I blink twice, because—to Cook’s credit—his picture of the globe is so very modern. Previous European navigators could plot latitude only, which led to a distortion of distances; great blank surfaces of the planet were filled in with products of the imagination, often of the here-be-dragons variety. Cook had lunar tables, a nautical almanac and, most important, an instrument known as Harrison’s chronometer, which enabled the reckoning of longitude and history’s first nearly accurate rendering of the globe.
Beyond the hard science was the social science—and for Eleanor, who is herself a social scientist, it was this that proved most compelling of all about Cook: that he so skillfully honed his powers of observation that he became a documentarian. “As the first of the really scientific investigator-explorers, Cook had a directive from the British Admiralty to secure portraits of the people and lands he visited,” says Eleanor. His voyages made, she emphasizes, a remarkable contribution to “visual education” in an age long before technology gave us a virtual twenty-four/seven window into one another’s lives. “Cook got to experience a vast array of Polynesian customs. He took note of many things, such as the love of children, the island festivals, the significance of foods.”
………………………….
View the complete article at:
http://www.hanahou.com/pages/magazine.asp?Action=DrawArticle&ArticleID=835&MagazineID=30
Photo by Charles E. Freeman
Bruce wrote:
Very interesting find, Bruce! Thank you for posting!
Honolulu Star-Bulletin (August 26, 1997)
Obituary for Eleanor Nordyke’s husband Dr. Robert Allan Nordyke (July 14th 1919 – August 23rd 1997)
Dr. Robert A. Nordyke, 73, of Honolulu, a nuclear medicine specialist, died Saturday in Honolulu.
He was chief of Straub Hospital’s nuclear medicine deparment, former governor of Hawaii chapter of American College of Physicians and former president of Hawaii Society of Internal Medicine.
Born in Woodland, Calif., he is survived by wife Eleanor C.; son Dr. Thomas J.; daughters Mary Ellen Nordyke-Grace, Carolyn N. Cozzette, Gretchen N. Worthington and Susan Nordyke; brother James P.; sisters Betty N. Scher, Helen N. Krug and Mary L. Hardison; and 11 grandchildren. Services: 4 p.m. Thursday at Central Union Church. Aloha attire. No flowers.
http://archives.starbulletin.com/97/08/26/community/obits.html
Additional background information regarding Eleanor Nordyke’s husband Dr. Robert Allan Nordyke:
He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940, having majored in English literature, political science and public speaking. He then took a two-month course in radio repair in San Francisco and thumbed a ride to San Diego where he got a job as a radio operator on a large tuna fishing boat.
During World War II Bob was a Captain in the U. S. Air Force, serving in radar countermeasures for four years, 1942-1946. He then went to the University of California Medical School on the GI bill, graduating in 1951. He and his brother, who was recently discharged from the Navy, bought a home for their mother and themselves. In order to pay the mortgage the brothers started a trash collecting business that they conducted between classes. A few years later while delivering a baby, Dr. Nordyke surprised the new mother when she recognized her “trash man”. Bob interned at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Oakland from 1951-52.
Dr. Nordyke was a resident at Wadsworth V. A. Hospital in Los Angeles from 1953 to 1956. He was an instructor in medicine at U.C.L.A. from 1956-1960. He was Assistant Chief of the Radioisotope Service at the Los Angeles V.A. Center from 1956-1961. He was American Board certified in Internal Medicine in 1959. Bob joined the Straub Clinic in Honolulu on April 11, 1960. He was a pioneer in nuclear medicine and was instrumental in the establishment of a Department of Nuclear Medicine at The Queen’s Hospital and at Straub Clinic. He also developed computerized record systems and databases for analyzing medical data and was a widely published medical researcher. Dr. Nordyke was an Associate Professor of Medicine at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii from 1966-1991, and a full Professor from 1991-1995.
Some of the medical and community organizations to which Dr. Nordyke belonged and served include: the Society of Nuclear Medicine, Hawaii Society of Nuclear Medicine, American Federation of Clinical Research, Western Society for Clinical Research, Sigma Xi, American Therapeutic Society, Hawaiian Academy of Sciences, Pan-Pacific Surgical Association, American College of Physicians, American Medical Association, Hawaii Medical Association, Honolulu County Medical Society, Phi Chi, Y.M.C.A. and Central Union Church.
http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/t/o/o/Terry-Tooemy/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0494.html
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