The oldest of two children born to Willard Hogle Branch and Elizabeth Mason Branch, Jeanne Branch Johnston was born in Hilo on December 2, 1939. Johnston's maternal grandfather, Charles William Mason, was the inventor of Canec, a fiberboard made from sugarcane bagasse. Mason became the superintendent of Hawaiian Cane Products Company, Ltd., located in Hilo near the site of the Waiakea Mill Company. After spending her early childhood in Hilo, Honolulu, Midway Island, and California, Johnston and her mother returned to Hilo in 1944. They lived in the Keaukaha district with her mother's parents. Three years later, Johnston moved to Honolulu, where she attended Lincoln School. She graduated from Punahou School in 1957. The mother of two grown children, Johnston is an O'ahu resident. Interviewed in her home, Johnston offered her perspective as a six-year-old child experiencing and witnessing the devastation of the 1946 tsunami in Keaukaha. It was this experience which inspired her involvement with the Pacific Tsunami Museum in downtown Hilo.

Scope and Content Note
A Hilo-born woman remembers her grandparents and their Keaukaha home. Only six years old when the 1946 tsunami hit, she tells of family members' escape and the post-tsunami destruction.

Program Note:  
This interview is part of the Center for Oral History's project Tsunamis Remembered: Oral Histories of Survivors and Observers in Hawai‘i. Interviews from this project are available in the Center's ScholarSpace open access repository.

The Center for Oral History (COH), in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, collects, documents, preserves and highlights the recollections of Native Hawaiians and the multi-ethnic people of Hawaiʻi. It produces oral histories and interpretive historical materials about lifeways, key historic events, social movements and Hawaiʻi’s role in the globalizing world, for the widest possible use.