ELYNORE HAMBLETON first flew into Honolulu during the winds and rains of Hurricane Dot in 1959. “We landed in the pouring rain,” she recalls. “The street was strewn with palm fronds and tin roofs.”

A year later, living in a home in Kahala, the family had to evacuate as a tsunami approached. (Their home was unscathed as the force of the wave hit Hilo, but still, it was a scary thing for the newcomers.)

Eventually things settled down and the family moved to Nuuanu.

“Then my husband dumped me,” Hambleton says in a matter-of-fact accounting of her not-so-auspicious early years in Hawaii.

These years followed an adventurous youth. Her father was Bain “Shorty” Fulton, founder of the Akron Municipal Airport in Ohio, an aviator who introduced her to that world. She earned a pilot’s license before she learned to drive a car.

“Everybody I knew was a pilot and they acted like they belonged to a secret society, and that intrigued me.”

After her divorce, Hambleton chose to stay in Hawaii with her two children. She worked as caretaker for a series of elderly clients and later as a secretary, studied painting, wrote a book about her father and survived the challenges, not the least of which was the loss of her son in Vietnam.

Fast-foward and she’s turned 88 in a year marked unfortunately with ailments from shingles to arthritis. “I got decrepit, I guess,” she says quite cheerfully.

It’s in her nature to be upbeat, she says. Besides, she takes considerable joy in her grandchildren - two, by her daughter on Maui - and her art. “I’ve been pretty lucky.”