First, Happy Birthday Pat. I still have not settled on my celebratory feast.
Today is Labor Day, and as is traditional for most holidays, I sometimes provide some background. Here is one posting from 4 September 2017, and at the bottom is mention of an early stage of Hurricane Irma. She went on to become a Category 5 and caused $77 billion in damages in the Caribbean and Florida. Incidentally, off the Carolinas right now is Hurricane Larry at 125 MPH. Fortunately, he is aware of our Delta variant surge of cases and has decided not to visit the USA. Borrowed from that article of four years ago is some wisdom from Garfield, which pretty much describes my weekend.
Today I continue describing my life, but can send you to a series of 15 postings I had more than seven years ago, describing my life in chronological transitions:
- Part 1: Overview and Early Youth.
- #2 Entering kindergarten: traumatic.
- #3 Entering intermediate school: diffficult.
- #4 Entering high school: not much better in my sophomore year.
- #5 Moving from Kakaako to Kalihi: changed my whole life.
- #6 On to Stanford: maybe the best decision I ever made.
- #7 Return to Hawaii--Naalehu, the Southernmost Community in the USA: a tough life.
- #8 On to LSU: I don't have to again take an exam!
- #9 Back home to the University of Hawaii: can life get any better?
- #10 Summers at Lawrence Livermore and Ames Research Center: enlightening.
- #11 On to the U.S. Senate: a challenge and opportunity.
- #12 Back to the University of Hawaii: my productive years.
- #13 Early retirement: my most enjoyable years.
- #14 Move to 15 Craigside: Just happened.
- #15 Is there an afterlife? Well, I have a few views on this subject, and just about all not so good.
You can find them and read one version of my life. Let me start when I was 15 months old when my mother, carrying me, pointed to the smoke we could see from our home in Kakaako. This was 7 December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The subsequent war no doubt had considerable influence about my future.
I was too young to remember much about World War II, and growing up in Kakaako was uneventful. I was part of a gang, but not the kind that fought off other gangs. From early youth our group varied from three to a dozen, and we just played and sat around. No drugs, no one went to jail, we mostly enjoyed life and existed. I lived on Ahui Street in the center of this map. This is a relatively new one, but the streets haven't changed. Ahui is two blocks from Ward. You can see how far I had to walk to McKinley High School.
Personally, I had no grand dreams. I don't recall ever thinking that someday I would become a professor of engineering, or being a major league baseball player. Well, it was clear I was no athlete, for I did not even make my little league baseball team, which was the Brooklyn Dodgers. But I was a good fan, and followed the team around when they had a game.
Above are some Brooklyn Dodgers players in 1950. I now have two complete sets of all the Topps cards of that year.
I had a brother who was 10 years older and another 4 years younger. Went fishing in Kewalo Basin and some body surfing at what is now Point Panic, which in those days was located adjacent to an incinerator. The whole area was a dirty mess. Now, a nice park with the University of Hawaii medical school.
I do recall that I did not wear (or even own) any shoes (nor slippers), walking to Pohukaina Elementary and Central Intermediate Schools. I can't imagine how I survived, for there were glass and sharp objects wherever I went. McKinley High School required you to wear shoes, and the process was that the person farthest away passed by and went to the next house, so that eventually we all showed up together tardy to our homerooms. We must have held the all-time record for staying after school for one hour, which is the penalty for being late. See that tall building? At one time there were plans to build a 650 foot tall skyscraper on the grounds of the old Pohukaina Elementary School, with the first two floors being a new elementary school.
The administration placed us in English/Social Studies (E/SS) classes according to our test scores and grades. We had more than 800 in our class, and I found myself in a group of so-so students as a sophomore at McKinley. Not only was my school deemed below average in scholarship, but all our sport teams occupied the cellar. Combined with the tendency of our Kakaako gang to be tardy to school, this could have been a low point of my academic career.
In this sophomore year, Bishop Estate kicked us and our neighborhood out of our rented homes to begin the process of building what now is the Ward complex of condos and shopping areas. My family moved to Dillingham Boulevard in Kalihi, so I had to catch the bus to school. Separated from my friends, my life suddenly changed. These friends of mine mostly planned to join the Army.
I would have too, but my older brother Stan was at the University of Michigan in graduate school. No doubt he influenced me to think about college.
Here is where it gets looney and even preposterous. I was never much of a student, but always did well in math. In the 8th grade we all took some national comprehensive test to compare us with the mainland. I think I fell into the bottom 10% on verbal ability. But, hey, I grew up in Kakaako where there was no intellectual interest. Yet, a next door neighbor became superintendent of our public schools, and another became president of the University of Hawaii. Some found a way to excel in the midst of this mediocrity. But those exceptions were yet to come.
My deficiency in verbal ability was confirmed when early in my junior year at McKinley I took the practice college board test. Scored somewhere in the 200's, which means, again, 90% of those who took that test did better than me.
All began to go well after my sophomore year. I can identify this transition period as a pivotal one for me where the combination of good effort and extraordinary luck turned around my life. As a junior I was placed in the top E/SS class, taught by Mildred Kosaki, who had just returned from the University Minnesota, where her husband Richard had earned a PhD in political science. I mention their names because they return later in this story. Here are my grades from Mrs. Kosaki. She is also the one who encouraged me to shoot for the stars.
My older brother must have influenced me to gain some extracurricular activities, play a sport and get good grades so I could be admitted to college. I thought, okay, why not the best, so I skipped even applying to the University of Hawaii and attempted to only get into the California Institute of Technology and Stanford. Today I wonder what on earth was I doing? I mean, one can dream, but such irrationality, for:
- My family could not afford to send me there.
- Had never left the state of Hawaii.
- Was a poor athlete.
- No membership in any social club and chaired nothing.
- In my days no one from McKinley actually went away to college.
But all of a sudden good things began to happen and I got incredibly lucky. Maybe just simply making an effort can lead to these things.
- Some of my good friends were on the high school tennis team and they were looking for anyone to make a full team. Mind you, I had never even dabbled in tennis before. Ended up playing around 750 out of 755 days in a row, and in the process became third singles (which made me the 5th best player). Most of the other teams were from private schools, and Punahou gave one scholarship/class, or probably had four of the best players in the state. I happen to play their #5 who wasn't on scholarship, and I tended to beat my opponents, and did well. Our team won more than lost, which was then unusual for our school.
I had never run for any kind of office in my life, but I thought this would be one way to gain some points for my college application. My three opponents were female, they split the vote, and by some miracle, in my junior year I was voted vice president of the senior class.- What this office did was make you chairman of the commencement, so I arranged to have Richard Kosaki as speaker. He had just started teaching at the UH, but went on to later become Chancellor. He too was a McKinley High School graduate and was immensely helpful in my academic career when I almost a quarter century later joined the University of Hawaii. Mildred quit teaching, became a systems analyst and in time was named to the board of Hawaiian Electric Company, which was extremely useful when I became director of Hawaii Natural Energy Institute.
- As VP, I also became chairman of a wide array organizations that padded my college application.
I broke my wrist playing basketball in the spring at about the time I was running for office. The cast I felt helped secure a few votes. The pity effect.- The set-up in Honolulu then was for a student after the junior year to toil at a pineapple cannery. Good for funds and it builds character. Well, I couldn't work, so I decided to memorize the vocabulary words in the Scholastic Aptitude Test book, and attempted several practice tests that were in the publication. Remember that 200-300 verbal score from the previous year? When I took the real SAT my score jumped into the 600's, while my math result was close to 800.
Plus (The McKinley Daily Pinion on April Fool's Day, April 1, 1958, but the news were accurate) there were other accomplishments:- Submitted an essay for a national anthology and a poem for a similar national poetry book, and both were selected.
- In a comprehensive math test I made a perfect score.
- Won the Bausch & Lomb award as top science student.
- Got one of highest awards at the State Science Fair.
Stanford will be part of a future story if I continue this series. Let me end with a whimsically amusing posting of three years ago entitled:
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