Hobby Garden: A Happy, By Stefan Verbano
E
very other day, the big four-engine seaplanes would roar over Johnson Lum’s grandfather’s
home on the main Fiji island of Viti Levu. The Sunderland Flying Boats were on rescue and reconnaissance missions over vast, isolated stretches of the Pacific Ocean, operating out of an air base at Laucala Bay near the capital city, Suva. Johnson lived with his family just a few miles away. The sight and sound of the World War II-era British plane, with its broad belly and more than 100-foot wingspan, sparked
a burning desire in Johnson’s impressionable six-year-old mind to become a master of machines someday. It was what set him on the path to be a self-taught engineer, who now, at 66, happily surrounds himself with anything that has a motor and moves. He spends his days constantly tinkering away at his verdant home-turned-amusement-park in East Hawai‘i. Many years after those formative moments in Fiji, Johnson finally built a Sunderland “flying boat” of his own—albeit one-tenth the size—from fiberglass and wood, covered in a skin of thin aluminum sheets and painted to look The Hobby Garden features a real working model train for keiki passengers that Johnson Lum built himself. Johnson is also its conductor and repairman, constantly at work during off-hours repairing the track that winds through the shaded complex of exhibits and educational models. photo by Stefan Verbano
like the real thing. Johnson’s model Sunderland hangs from the ceiling and forms the centerpiece of what he calls “The Wow Room,” a
museum-like showroom of plexiglass display cases full of every imaginable sort of model machine, including planes, cars, trucks, tanks, sailboats, steamships, rocket ships, and much more. Everywhere there are Hot Wheels treasure chests, painstakingly arranged everywhere. The room, named after the excited exclamations made by wide-eyed visiting schoolchildren, is just one piece of Johnson’s life’s work: “The Hobby Garden”—his and his wife’s home-based, family-friendly amusement park located in Hawaiian Paradise Park that is part science fair, part petting zoo, part museum, and part teaching farm. Hobby Garden has everything: songbirds, tortoises, rabbits, ball games, cultural dioramas from around the world, a tabletop concrete volcano with built-in fog machine, homemade seaworthy boats, a fishpond teeming with fish, rods with barbless hooks for kids to catch them with, and a working, rideable model train that loops through it all. Johnson is its conductor, and drives the mini-locomotive along a narrow track running atop thousands of hand-laid, hand-painted wooden railroad ties. Within the massive fishpond, koi, tilapia, midas, and an
