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CK: Are there any particular instances of your lobbying the legislatures in your district that were interesting or hard to get, or what are some of the things that you did to...

FH: We had a Congressman Pashayan, he was an Armenian person, and I knew him personally from when he was a little kid. But he was for redress but not cash payments; he wanted to build a monument or something. But Tom Shimasaki was very active in our area and Frank Nishio and I, we worked on him and finally we got him to agree to co-sponsor and recommend cash payments. He was one difficulty. Pete Wilson was a senator, I think, at that time. He came to Fresno to address a dinner of the Nisei Farmers League, you've heard of the Nisei Farmers League? And I knew he was coming, so I wrote him a letter and I told him I wanted him to address the matter of redress personally at that dinner. And when we were at the dinner -- Harry Kubo was president -- Harry Kubo came to me and said, "Wilson wants to talk to you." So we talked to Wilson and we told him why we wanted redress and he nodded, and on his way out, his aide was following right behind him and we asked him, "Well, what about that?" And he said, "Don't worry, he's gonna vote for redress." Those were two cases that we thought -- and you know Senator Paul Simon? Yeah, he came to Fresno for a fundraiser, he was running for president, I think.

LH: In 1984.

FH: Yeah, he was running for president. Yeah, he came to Fresno and again we went to him because we knew that he would be important in this fight in Congress. And at that dinner I pointedly asked him, "What is your position on" -- I forgot the name of the bill, "S-" something or other -- he didn't know what "S-" something or other was meant so he asked his aide, "What is that?" and the aide told him. "Well, I am going to co-sponsor that bill," but I wanted him to come out in publicly and make that statement and he did. Those are some of the, and the others, like we would go to their fundraisers and talk to them, and they were duck soup, they... fundraising means a lot to them.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.