MAGIC CAN HAPPEN IF YOU TRY

 I have lived a charmed life, made so by moments of magic.

• I'm 86 years old, healthy and happy.
• I have not yet spent a night as a patient in any hospital.
• I've had two personal relationships that were important to what I am today.  I'll keep these private.
• I've accumulated more than 3 million air miles, mostly on Star Alliance.

• 
  Been on a dozen, or two, cruises.
• Have had maybe 15 around the world trips.
• Written five books.
• Worked on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence for NASA.
• Wrote the the legislation that became law for hydrogen when I worked in the U.S. Senate.
• In my 27th year of retirement.

Not sure who said SOMETIMES MAGIC CAN HAPPEN IF YOU TRY.  Checked with various AI sources and got nothing.

In a way, though, that thought has driven me through most of my life.  The first time was when I was a junior in high school.  

• 
  That was 70 years ago.
• Through all of my life as a student, I was just above average.  In my sophomore year at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was not in the top English/Social Studies class.
• I have noticed that I don't one day just try something new.  Something traumatic needs to happen to my life to kick me out of my normal ennui.  In 1956 my family got evicted from our home in Kakaako by Ward Estates when they began to develop what is now Ward Village.

• 
  We moved to Kalihi, and I had to catch a bus my final two years at McKinley.
• In my junior year, I had two fabulous teachers, Mildred Kosaki in English/Social Studies (I must have done reasonably well in my sophomore year because I was promoted to this top junior class) and Sueko Hirokawa in the sciences.  I have a posting about these two teachers, titled CROSSROADS:  Stanford University.
• 
  This article also traced why I chose to even try to get into Stanford.
• A second trauma occurred, breaking my wrist, which led me into more magic.  
• I end with the rest of this story from that posting.

An incredible series of luck helped.  First, my family was forced to move away from Kakaako at the end of my sophomore year at McKinley. (This was the necessary trauma.)  My gang was just a bunch of loyal friends.   There was a dozen of us and by the time everyone got together we were almost always late to our home rooms.  This meant we were penalized by being kept after school for an hour.  Frankly, there was nothing in their attitude that compromised my studies, but the physical separation I think was a factor in changing my general attitude about my future.

Second, students (from public schools in Honolulu) normally worked in the pineapple cannery between their junior and senior years.  I broke my wrist playing basketball in April.  (The trauma.)  This resulted in, perhaps, two most important consequences:

• I had never run for any kind of office in my life (and since then never did again).  I don't know how this happened, but I found myself campaigning for Senior Class vice president against three females, one who was heavily favored, and went on to later becoming Narcissus Queen.  The combination of gender ratio advantage and the cast on my wrist was just enough for me to prevail.  As vice president I also was to become chairman of the commencement and a bunch of other leadership roles.
• As I couldn't work in the cannery, I decided to memorize the words in a guide on how to do well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.  After just a couple of months of this intensive activity, my verbal score improved from the 200's to high 600's, with my math score close to 800, the maximum.

In my sophomore year some of my friends on the tennis team asked me to join them, as they were short of members.  Never having played before, from the end of my sophomore year to much of my senior year I must have spent 690 out of 700 days on the courts, which was the norm for the group.  In those days McKinley and Roosevelt were the only public schools competing against Punahou, Iolani, Kamehameha and Mid-Pac.  Those private schools gave tennis scholarships, so we should have had no real chance of beating them.  But we did, and by, again, a fate of  luck, I was the third singles, which meant I was the fifth best player on the team, as the third and fourth served as the first doubles.  Each private school only had a few scholarship players, and when it came to their fifth best, they were no better than I was.  So I proceeded to win most of my matches, if not all of them, even though I would not have been able to beat the top players from McKinley. (This was the only athletic activity I had in my Stanford application form.  This box had to be checked.)

While in my sophomore year I was a below average student, by the end of my senior year, I was among the best students in the state, for I went on to win various honors, like the Bausch and Lomb Science medal, an Elks Scholarship, a Science Fair award, had both a poem and an essay published in a national anthology and carried pretty much a straight A average.

A school like Stanford not only looks at your grade average and SAT scores.  The extra-curricula activities are maybe more important.  It was not like in high school I had reached a certain crossroad and dedicated my life to accumulating all these impacting factors like class officership, success on my tennis team and high college board scores.  Those things, mostly through luck and circumstances, just happened.  (Again, traumas and acts of magic.)

Thus, I never even bothered to apply to the University of Hawaii.  I just took a chance on Stanford and the California Institute of Technology.  CalTech accepted me, and that was my first choice, for they only accepted around 250/year and was generally considered to be the most difficult school to get into.  However, their financial package was limited.  Luckily, Stanford provided a full scholarship with tuition waiver, room and board paid and a part time job working in the library.  In follow-up discussions with teachers and counselors I picked Stanford.  CalTech would have led me into a totally different way of life.

If I had at the beginning analyzed the reality and also the economics of going away to college, any kind of common sense would have convinced me to stay home for college.  This experience of shooting for the best against all odds, and succeeding, changed my whole life attitude.  Then, graduating from Stanford provided the most important payoff:  CONFIDENCE.  

But the key combination was unpredictable trauma, followed by successful comeback, leading to a magical conclusion.  This fusion has occurred throughout my life. 

Even worked on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  But my time there was just another eventual act of magic.

A lot more magic after I graduated, which could form the basis of a future posting.  A more recent bit of magic was moving into 15 Craigside, a senior's community.

• I've now been here 12 years.
• Life is secure and comfortable.
• Here is our meal schedule for this week.

• 
  Not quite CHOCOLATE, CAVIAR, FOIE GRAS AND TRUFFLES EXTRAVAGANZA ON THE SILVER WHISPER, the title of a day on our cruise from which we returned earlier this month.  And I should add champagne, vodka, wine and more.

• 
  But too much of that kind of food is just good for my body.  The five-week trip we took to the Total Solar Eclipse in Iceland and Greenland resulted in my gaining 12 pounds, which I was shocked to learn was physically possible for me.  How did that trip go?

• SO HOW WAS OUR LATEST TRIP?: Part 3
• SO HOW WAS OUR LATEST TRIP?: Part 2
• SO HOW WAS OUR LATEST TRIP?

• 
  The good news is that through simple dieting, still consuming meals like what you see above, plus a lot of soup and salad meals, I lost 12.5 pounds in 9 days at 15 Craigside.  By all measures, this was like magic, for I didn't think this was attainable.
• I also found out why my knees ached when I walked.  I was too heavy.  The pain went away when I lost 12.5 pounds.  Can you image how much added stress carrying a ten pound bag of sugar, and two additional pounds, can do to your joints?
• My next bit of magic?  

To close, a few cartoons from the Stanford Daily.

Stanford and Cal Berkely are close rivals.

You won't know what this final cartoon is all about unless you are familiar with the Stanford Marshmallow Test.

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CROSSROADS: Stanford University

Late last year I began a series entitled Crossroads of my Life.   A long time ago, I might have wanted to become a dentist.  That's me with my dog at home in Kakaako,  When Sputnik shocked America, like many, I thought, perhaps I should look into engineering.  So, where was the best school to follow this pathway?  Today I think back to my first big decision:  Why I went to Stanford University.

I was a junior at McKinley High School when I took the practice College Board Exam in the Fall, and soon thereafter learned I did well in math, but my verbal was somewhere in the 200's.  Being in the bottom 10% just confirmed my gross deficiency, for in the eight grade, my scores were quite similar.

During those days in the mid-50's, very few from McKinley went to college on the mainland.  However, my older brother was living in Ann Arbor and going to graduate school at the University of Michigan, so he was my inspiration to go beyond the University of Hawaii.  Two high school teachers were also crucial to my dreams.  Sueko Hirokawa provided the right spark in the sciences and Mildred Kosaki was my English-Social Studies instructor in my junior year.  If these three individuals were not there, who knows where I would today be.  

To the right are Mildred, and her husband, Richard, in a more recent photo.  He was a beginning political science professor at the University of Hawaii when Mrs. Kosaki taught me.  I had the foresight to select him as our commencement speaker.  He went on to become the founder of our community college system and served as Chancellor of the University of Hawaii.  My career at the UH was no doubt aided by his presence at the highest level of administration.  After I retired, Richard passed on to me a copy of his 1958 commencement address.

An incredible series of luck helped.  First, my family was forced to move away from Kakaako at the end of my sophomore year at McKinley.  My gang was just a bunch of loyal friends.  We did not rob or cause any harm.  There was a dozen of us and by the time everyone got together we were almost always late to our home rooms.  This meant we were penalized by being kept after school for an hour.  Frankly, there was nothing in their attitude that compromised my studies, but the physical separation I think was a factor in changing my general attitude about my future.

Second, students normally worked in the pineapple cannery between their junior and senior years.  I broke my wrist playing basketball in April.  This resulted in, perhaps, two most important consequences:

• I had never run for any kind of office in my life (and since then never did again).  I don't know how this happened, but I found myself campaigning for Senior Class vice president against three females, one who was heavily favored, and went on to later becoming Narcissus Queen.  The combination of gender ratio advantage and the cast on my wrist was just enough for me to prevail.  As vice president I also was to become chairman of the commencement and a bunch of other leadership roles.
• As I couldn't work in the cannery, I decided to memorize the words in a guide on how to do well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.  After just a couple of months of this intensive activity, my verbal score improved from the 200's to high 600's, with my math score close to 800, the maximum.

In my sophomore year some of my friends on the tennis team asked me to join them, as they were short of members.  Never having played before, from the end of my sophomore year to much of my senior year I must have spent 690 out of 700 days on the courts, which was the norm for the group.  In those days McKinley and Roosevelt were the only public schools competing against Punahou, Iolani, Kamehameha and Mid-Pac.  Those private schools gave tennis scholarships, so we should have had no real chance of beating them.  But we did, and by, again, a fate of  luck, I was the third singles, which meant I was the fifth best player on the team, as the third and fourth served as the first doubles.  Each private school only had a few scholarship players, and when it came to their fifth best, they were no better than I was.  So I proceeded to win most of my matches, if not all of them, even though I would not have been able to beat the top players from McKinley.

While in my sophomore year I was a below average student, by the end of my senior year I was among the best students in the state, for I went on to win various honors, like the Bausch and Lomb Science medal, an Elks Scholarship, a Science Fair award, had both a poem and an essay published in a national anthology and carried pretty much a straight A average.

A school like Stanford not only looks at your grade average and SAT scores.  The extra-curricula activities are maybe more important.  It was not like in high school I had reached a certain crossroad and dedicated my life to accumulating all these impacting factors like class officership, success on my tennis team and high college board scores.  Those things, mostly through luck and circumstances, just happened.

Thus, I never even bothered to apply to the University of Hawaii.  I just took a chance on Stanford and the California Institute of Technology.  CalTech accepted me, and that was my first choice, for they only accepted around 250/year and was generally considered to be the most difficult school to get into.  However, their financial package was limited.  Luckily, Stanford provided a full scholarship with tuition waiver and a part time job working in the library.  In follow-up discussions with teachers and counselors I picked Stanford.  CalTech would have led me into a totally different way of life.

If I had at the beginning analyzed the reality and also the economics of going away to college, any kind of common sense would have convinced me to stay home for college.  This experience of shooting for the best against all odds, and succeeding, changed my whole life attitude.  Then, graduating from Stanford provided the most important payoff:  CONFIDENCE.  

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JUST ONE THING CAN CHANGE YOUR WHOLE LIFE

It's indeed a scary thought, but one thing (incident, person, whatever) can change your whole life.  Accidents, plane crashes,  war, lottery...  If Pearl and I had a child soon after we were married on the Big Island, we could well still be in Naalehu.  Life would have been totally different. Better?  Maybe.  Worse?  Most probably.

In 1962 Philip Dick wrote an alternate-history novel, The Man in the High Castle, where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II.  Amazon will this year release the third season of a different society based on this book.  Life is eerie and disturbing.

Yesterday featured my lengthiest blog ever of the Kakaako outdoor mural museum.  I wondered last night what my life would have been if the Kakaako camp I lived in was not converted to warehouses, and how different my life would have been under those circumstances.  

I was a sophomore at McKinley High School when my family had to move, and we did to Kalihi.  My bond with the gang I grew up with was forever severed, for now I caught the bus to school.  It was a close group of around eight individuals.  The one furthest from school started the walk to school in the morning.  By the time we all made it to campus and our homeroom, we were perpetually late and had to return for an hour of penalty at the end of the day.

In a way, this was symptomatic of gang life.  We were good friends, and there was not any particular pressure to do wrong.  They did drink screwdrivers and most of them smoked, something I avoided with no particular disfavor.  They all grew up to be good citizens, my best friend, Kenneth, who went on to run Horimoto Fish Market and another, Richard, graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Hawaii.  No one became a convict, and I don't think anyone used drugs.  Interestingly enough, much later in life I joined them for occasional dinners, and I was the only one who drank and smoked (an occasional cigar).

In those days in our high schools, the more capable students were placed together in English-Social Studies, declining to the lower performing classes according to demonstrated capability.  I was not in the top group.

In the eighth-grade comprehensive tests, I had scored in the bottom 20% on the verbal portion.  My math scores had always been okay.  I took the practice College Board test early in my junior year and scored below 300 (low of 200 to high of 800) on the verbal section, confirming my incompetence.

I think it had a lot to do with two teachers, Mildred Kosaki in English-Social Studies and Sueko Hirokawa in Science.  They must have seen something in me, affecting my whole life.  In one year I somehow made perfect scores on various exams, improved my Scholastic Aptitude Test to 600+ in verbal and near 800 in math, won various national awards, played third singles on the McKinley tennis team, was elected (my first and last attempt at vieing for any office) vice-president of the senior class (and the only reason why I won was that I was running against three girls who somehow split the vote in my favor) and got accepted at Stanford University.

The next 60 year period was an amazing true fantasy.  However, if my family had remained in Kakaako, I probably would have gone on to the University of Hawaii, and I would guess into engineering, for my older brother got a civil engineering degree from there.  I would have found a job at Pearl Harbor and gone on to a life of relative leisure, as many of my high school classmates did.  Nothing wrong with all that, and only if I succeeded.

What Stanford did was instill confidence.  Under this alternate-history circumstance I would not have gone on to a PhD and full professorship in engineering, and certainly not have:

• worked on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• spent time at the NASA Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
• served three years for U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga in Washington, D.C. where I was involved in original legislation for the creation of wind energy, ocean energy and hydrogen legislation for the nation and world

• become director of the Hawaii Natural Energy 
• co-found the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research
• gained for the University of Hawaii national centers in hydrogen (Department of Energy), seabed resources (Department  of Interior) and marine byproducts (National Science Foundation)
• created the Blue Revolution

I almost surely would not have met Pearl, my wife, nor by now flown more than 2 million miles on Star Alliance.  No dozen times around the world, no published books and no blog site.

At the age of 77 and in my 19th year of retirement, what a blessing to still have an office at the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus.  In a few days I leave for Japan, where Kyushu University is paying all expenses for a simple plenary talk about renewable energy.

Then in mid-February, the World Aquaculture Society requesting a presentation on the Blue Revolution at their Paris Hotel gathering in Las Vegas.  What a life, setting the tone for the future of Planet Earth and Humanity.  Something that would not have happened had my family not been kicked out of Kakaako more than 60 years ago.

On the other hand, of all the ironies, I could well today nevertheless be living at 15 Craigside.  The camp in Kakaako where I grew up had 95% Oriental people.  15 Craigside has about this percentage.  I would still be living life my way.  

No difference at all.  Yet, I still think some of the seeds I planted in my actual life will improve the World in wonderful ways, a legacy that would not have been possible had I stayed in Kakaako or Naalehu.

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