<Begin Segment 11>

TI: Okay, going back to Frank Chin, Frank was the person that, that helped convince you to head up the organization.

WH: Yeah.

TI: Can you talk more about that and how that all came about?

WH: I don't think there's too much more I can say.

GK: Well, it's just that you were cut off before, so if you could just tell the story again that you were telling.

WH: Oh, well, I think we had... I remember we were, I was talking to him over the phone and he was having dinner. I could hear him eating. [Laughs] And we were talking about, I was just arguing with him about why I shouldn't lead the thing, "Why don't you have so and so?" Then he started going through the, the various alternatives in Seattle, and why he didn't think they were... they were good people, but they weren't leaders. And I didn't know them that well, but I could see that his points were well-made. And I don't remember what the points were, but... and so that had some influence on me. Frank, I think, got to know me through my writing. I'd written a lot of letters to the editor to the Pacific Citizen and maybe some to the Rafu Shimpo, but probably mainly for the Pacific Citizen, and he had come to some funny conclusions. Like, for example, he thought I was a minister. And he written something, I wrote back and said, "Hey, Frank, I'm not a minister, I'm a computer programmer." [Laughs]

TI: As you mentioned, you have Frank thinking that you're a minister. I mean, I know the church played, had a large influence on you in your life. Let's talk a little bit about that right now.

WH: Yeah, I think that you can't overlook the church because I was very heavily involved with the Northern Illinois Conference. It's a regional collection of about 400 churches. And the Methodist church is very hierarchical in structure. And the Northern Illinois Conference had a group of people, they called themselves a renewal caucus. And our purpose was to make the conference itself more democratic and to respond to various issues like civil rights issues, peace issues and stuff like that. And it worked. We did our job. We got the conference to be more democratic. But one of the things they did very early on was, their rule was that if you wanted to push an issue, you had to be willing to speak to it yourself. Well, I wasn't a public speaker and the conference has about a thousand people in it, both minister and lay delegates. And so I says, "Oh my god, I got to get up and talk about all this stuff." But you know, I says, well, got to do it. So I started doing that, and that's how I learned how to talk. Because up until then, I was really... some of it was stage fright and I'd get real nervous. But gradually I began to overcome... my voice would waver and stuff like that. But I learned a lot about organizing, about how to do things. You know, to be oriented at being very clear about your objectives and so forth, how to work out compromises, and this and that. I think I learned, it was sort of a prelude, at least from the legislative side, in what kind of things was needed. Of course, I didn't know anything about Congress. But it was a good training ground, how to get things going.

And you know, when I interacted with the JACL, as I said earlier, 1970 convention, they were just neophytes when it came to parliamentary procedure, and I was an old pro by then because of my experience in church. And the thing that I learned, one of the things I learned, an important lesson, was pay attention to Robert's Rules of Order, the parliamentary rules. So I started reading the thing, studying it. Because we used it, the church was very formal. And I remember we had a new bishop, and he wasn't familiar with the spirit that had developed in our conference and it became much more democratic. And the bishop tried to introduce legislation. Well, he's the chair of the... he can't introduce legislation. And as soon as he tried to introduce legislation, everybody rebelled. Liberals and conservatives said, "You can't do that. You're the chair. If you asked one of us to do it, we'd be happy to do it, but you can't do it." And so it didn't work. And he was really disappointed. But he was learning the hard way that he was violating Robert's Rules. And people would challenge the bishop and the bishop would, you know, he said, "You really want to challenge me?" "Yeah, we want to challenge you." But the thing is, that's how learn. You learn how to do that, and it wasn't that easy. And there were a lot of disappointments, a lot of defeats, we didn't win every time. So you learn how to lose, too, which is important. It's important to learn how to lose, so it doesn't destroy you completely, you know, you can learn to recover. So I think that the church was a very important experience. And the other thing about the church is that you have to, you really have to appeal to not people's intellect, but their spirits, their hearts. How they feel about something. Because that's basically how I think you and me, not just Christians, but how human beings respond. They respond with their hearts, and so you have to try and convey this to others.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.