The Naked Man Of Holualoa

He indeed was naked, while I was dressed in rough clothing and high other boots, and I could imagine I was trying to follow Tarzan himself • he bounded about in the wild jungles of Africa, because this man as trying to show me at first hand how nature takes wildly over and ims abandoned Kona coffee land into a tangled jungle of growth and idergrowth.

[JRTY years of active living in the open under the Kona sky, Jly bereft of even the suggestion , fig leaf, subsisting on fruit and and certain vegetables, had made into a man of iron. Mosquitoes other man-eating insects of /aii have no use whatever for iron jt me they love. [y only concession to nudity [st I wove my way under and vq and through the tangles of s and tree roots and high grasses varied foliage, trying to stay close ind that naked man of iron, was ; knees and bare arms—and even I regretted for two hours after d, my flesh afire in a maddening gatory of painful itching. More r, I could not quite keep up with ; 64-year-old bush athlete in the :e coffee jungles somewhere down slope from the little Hawaii town Tolualoa. ohn Stermer is what is called a dist and a Vegetarian in proper, ite terms. Nudism and vege anism are health movements, of rse. Vegetarianism has always 1 its followers the world over, and lism has quietly become so popular both Europe and America that rest of us do not realise how ny nudist cults or clubs are in stence today—for most of us like • meat, and are too modest or i tender to wander around naked.

But John Stermer, out of full pect for us sissies, is modest

enough when running nude to carry bathing trunks in his hand and to don them at once if one of us appears within seeing or hearing distance.

Thirty years ago Stermer came to Hawaii from California looking for a paradise where he could go naked the year round and live on tropical fruits and nuts. He was at first dis appointed: the “natives”, he dis covered, had long been wearing an abundance of clothing, and they lived on fish and pork and beef and many things other than fruit and nuts. And Honolulu was no virgin forest, but already rather a modern little city.

Fruit, Nuts, Nudists It was there, however, that he met a local horticulturist who advised that Mr. and Mrs. Stermer go to a lava soil area known as the Kona district, on another island of Hawaii, where the semi-tropical climate was so good as to permit fruit and nuts and nudists and vegetables to grow the year round—where the land was not crowded, moreover, and a fellow would find enough seclusion to live in propriety without clothing.

Says Stermer today: “Something bearing all-year-round—fresh fruit the year round! That’s why I came here”.

And so the Stermers came over to a Kona hillside and began gradually to build their own little corner of paradise to suit their modest but special demands. And in Kona their

son was born and grew up to be a strong and healthy man, currently serving abroad with the Army.

John Stermer began his great life work of experimentation in growing tropical fruit and nut trees from all over the world— “food trees”, as he calls them—and Martha Stermer grew the family vegetables, in her own little garden, and soon began writing her current weekly column for the island paper.

Though Stermer worked at ranch ing to earn a living during his first few years in Kona, he has devoted the past 25 years to schooling him self in that branch of horticulture known as pomology —the science of fruit and nut culture—and today is known as a pomologist in horti cultural circles throughout the world.

His open-walled rustic cottage, deep in overgrown abandoned coffee land, seems to bulge with books on the subject (and many other books, too); and his files are full of corres pondence from the world’s leading plant scientists.

This rather intellectual iron-man, nudist, pomologist lion-maned, bushy-browed, iron-grey-bearded, with John Barrymore profile— believes that when his experimental cultivation is completed he will offer the people of Kona one of the very best supplements to coffee-growing: a full catalogue of tropical “food trees”.

Stermer’s motto: “Reshape the world and man’s life with trees!”

John Stermer —the naked man of Holualoa.