<Begin Segment 11>

BN: I have to have you tell the Pat Sumi, Park Chung Hee story, it's legendary.

JF: [Laughs] There's... oh, I don't know what issue it appeared in.

BN: Yeah, I don't remember the date, which issue it came.

JF: But all I know, we took up a real large section of it because, at the time, there was an election going on in Korea that involved the incumbent and some other, I forgot. Anyway, the incident was, I was in the office late when the phone started to ring. And no one else was around, so I pick up the phone and Pat Sumi, who, at the time, is considered a "movement heavy." So she's one of the people who is a public face of the Asian American movement, she's asked to speak at all these different events, very eloquent, and powerful speaker. So she's on the other end of this phone, and I can tell there's lots of street noise and stuff going on in the background, and she's reminding me about this article that I was just typing up about the reelection of --

[Interruption]

Anyway, Pat Sumi calls, and she wants to check on the status of the article. And I said, "Yeah, we got it," and she says, "I want this to be the headline for it." And she recites it off and I write it down, and it says, "We support the free election proxy of the Korean people," or something like that. And so I read it back to her, it didn't make sense to me. And I read it back to her and there's a pause, and she says, "Yeah, okay." Click. So I said, okay, get my burnisher out and the Letraset, and I select these one and a half inch high bold Letraset type to print it out, what she told me to appear above this article, and it was totally wrong. Oh, my god, I got it so wrong, it didn't make any sense to anybody when it was printed, and it ran that way in the paper and it's still there for all of Densho's readers to find. We'll call that a little Easter egg -- [laughs] -- for all the Densho listeners, you could find the one issue where there's big headline that says, "We Support the Free Election Proxy by the Korean People," or something like that.

BN: To declare which...

JF: What was it supposed to be? It was supposed to be, "We Support the Reelection of Park Chung-hee." [Laughs] It sounds the same... oh god, that was so terrible. And so Bruce and Evelyn, they noticed it right away and they said, "What the hell?" And to this day, they still have a big laugh about it with me. But man, I was, I think I avoided all public events for the next few weeks where Pat Sumi might show up so that she wouldn't strangle me. [Laughs] That was so funny.

BN: Yeah, I've heard that story, like I said, so it's an honor to meet "Free Election Proxy" guy.

JF: Yes. Guilty as evidenced.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.