<Begin Segment 24>

AI: Well, moving ahead in time once again, I'm going to move us up to 1946. And you and your wife decided to move back to the West.

BH: Yes.

AI: And move to Denver, where you joined the Denver Post staff. And I'm wondering if you would just say a little bit about that transition to Denver...

BH: Yeah.

AI: ...and how, what you found there when you came with your family.

BH: Well, the, our reception in Des Moines was very warm. We made some very good friends there. And I was working for a newspaper that I was proud to be a member of. But the climate was uncomfortable, and I missed the mountains, and my son had allergies, and we decided to come West. The Denver Post had been a terrible, terrible newspaper. And I write about that in a book called, Thunder in the Rockies, which is a very strong history of the terrible things that the Denver Post did. But after the war, the ownership of the Post realized that they were behind the times. They had to change. And they brought in a new publisher, the big boss from Portland, Oregon, who I knew by reputation. He had been publisher of The Oregonian in Portland. And so I had heard that they were hiring, and so I had written, I wrote to the Post, asking for a job. And few weeks later, I got a reply saying, "Yeah. Come on and come to work for us." And about that time, I got cold feet, and I wondered, "Can this tiger change its spots completely? Do I really want to go to work there?"

So I got on the train, overnight -- they had an overnight train from Des Moines to Denver. And I got on the train and rode all night and washed up in the men's room of the Union Station and went up to see Palmer Hoyt. And I told him of my concerns. And he said, "You don't have to worry about that. You'll go as far in this organization as your abilities will take you." And I said, "Mr. Hoyt, that's fine. I'll come to work." Well, I was making $62.50 a week in Des Moines. And the scale in Denver was $60.00, and they had federal restrictions on pay increases. And I went back to Des Moines and told my boss that I was going to quit and go on West, and he said, "How much are they going to pay you?" And I said, "$60.00." "How much are you making here?" I said, $62.50. "Well," he said, "I'll raise your pay by $2.50 if you'll stay." [Laughs] And I said, "Frank, I appreciate that, but I've made up my mind. I'm going back, I'm going West."

And I was very well-received in Denver. And the one incident that I remember very clearly, we were in the city room, which was quite a large room, and I was in the back of it. And a Chinese American friend from Seattle who was going through Denver at that time, he came to see me. And he looked me up and came to the back of the room where I was. And he said, "You know what happened out there? I told the receptionist, 'I'd like to see Mr. Hosokawa.' And the receptionist, the receptionist said, 'He's the man in the back of the room with the blue, blue shirt.'" And this Chinese guy said, "She didn't say, 'He's that Japanese guy back there.'" And that really impressed me.

And Hoyt was true to his promise that I would go as far as my abilities would take me. I was given one responsible job after another, and the last seven years at the Post, I was editor of the editorial page, telling 400,000 readers, a guy who had been imprisoned because he was suspect, his loyalty was suspect, now telling 400,000 readers what to think of what the president is doing or what Congress should be doing or whatever. And I really enjoyed that job.

AI: That must have given you a great deal of satisfaction.

BH: Yes. And there was no question from the public. I was recognized as Bill Hosokawa, the guy from the Post.

AI: Rather than --

BH: The "Jap" kid.

AI: ...Hosokawa that...

BH: Yeah.

AI: Well, one of the notable things that happened in 1950 in your career was that you became the Denver Post's first war correspondent and covered the Korean War.

BH: Yes.

AI: And I know that you have written a bit about this, but at that time, you were thirty-five years old. At that time, you had just had your fourth child. So you had four children.

BH: Yeah.

AI: And, but you did accept this assignment.

BH: Yes.

AI: And in, in particular, I wanted to ask, because you hadn't, haven't written much about the, this aspect. Was there anything about covering a war in Asia, where again the U.S. was fighting an Asian enemy, and then you being, covering it as a journalist, an American with an Asian ancestry, Asian face, did anything come up in regard to that?

BH: No, because we were -- the angle that you bring up, we were also fighting with Asians. They were our allies, and we were going out there to help save them. It wasn't white man versus yellow man. There was that ideology there.

AI: And so that was a very significant difference from --

BH: Oh, yeah, sure.

AI: ...World War II. Well, continuing on --

BH: May I interrupt you just...

AI: Yes.

BH: I went to Vietnam also. And here, at the time I went, which is 1960, '63 or '64, we had only 20,000 men there. And their mission was to help the Vietnamese, South Vietnamese develop the wherewithal to resist Communism. And the men that I encountered, they were mostly professional soldiers, and they were very dedicated to the idea of helping the Vietnamese fight off the Communists so that they could build up their own country. And shortly after I came back, there was the Tonkin incident, and suddenly, it wasn't the Vietnamese fighting the Vietnamese with us helping the South. It became our war, and we had a half a million Americans doing the fighting for the Vietnamese. Well, that changed the, the entire complexion of that war. And, but the time, at the time I was there, I thought we belonged there and we were doing a very noble thing.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2001 Densho. All Rights Reserved.