As a student in Ngchesar Elementary School in the mid-fifties, I used to join the older students when they gathered around our principal, Mr. Olkeriil Minor, to hear him tell news stories about the outside world. Olkeriil was an avid sports enthusiast. He spoke about the exploits of Jackie Robinson, the legendary black baseball player who broke the color line in US Major League Baseball in 1946, and about the victories of boxing greats such as Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano.
Later, as a journalism student at the University of Hawaii, I read in sport magazines the same stories recounted years earlier by Olkeriil. I was mystified as to how and where Olkeriil got his information about outside sport events. How did Olkeriil, who did not speak nor read the English language, get to know so much about sport events in the United States during the late forties and early fifties? The mystery was partially solved when I asked Mr. David Ramarui, long time educator in Palau and onetime Senator in the Congress of Micronesia, how Olkeriil got to know so much about US sport events at a time when radios were unheard of in Palau. Mr. Ramarui, after much chuckling, said he was partially responsible for much of Olkeriil’s expertise in US sport events.
“You see, Harry Uehara, a Nissei from Hawaii who married Teiko from Angaur, was assigned to the Palau Education Office where I worked back in those days. He was a regular subscriber of the Hawaii Hochi, an English/Japanese newspaper, which Mr. Uehara passed on to me after reading it. I, in turn, forwarded it to Olkeriil Minor in Ngchesar and that’s how he got to read, in Japanese, about Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano. Of course, Olkeriil was very fluent in Japanese and he enjoyed very much every copy of the Hawaii Hochi he got from Mr. Uehara. As an educator, he passed on his newfound information about sports in the United States to his students, such as yourself and many others”, Mr. Ramarui explained.
The whole story finally came together when I met in 1970 the man who was responsible for sending copies of the Hawaii Hochi to Mr. Harry Uehara. The man was Larry Sakamoto, a former editor of Hawaii Hochi, who joined our Trust Territory Information Division on Saipan that year.
Mr. Sakamoto was a member of the much-decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a US Army unit made up of Nisseis from Hawaii that fought in Europe during World War 11. He wrote the book “Hawaii’s Own”, which was adapted by MGM into a motion picture named after the 442nd famous battle cry “Go for Broke”. As editor of the Hawaii Hochi, he sent copies of the newspaper to the Nisseis who fought in World War 11, including Harry Uehara. That’s how copies of that newspaper, with its reports on Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and Rocky Marciano, found their way to Olkeriil and his elementary school students in Ngchesar, which included twelve years old, me.
