<Begin Segment 25>

MM: If someone were to describe Dick Kosaki, the junior at UH, how would they describe you?

RK: Oh, I don't know. I had a lot of hair. [Laughs] And I was active in student government. One of the interesting things we did as student body president was -- and I tried to be, I mean, at that time as I remember, I tried to steer us away from carnivals and dances. We did that and I had a good person or persons who could handle those areas which weren't my primary interest. I tried to get something like the sponsoring panel discussions. One of the interesting things we did... oh yeah, preparing for statehood for Hawaii. We were very active in this movement. And congressional committees were coming regularly to Hawaii to have hearings, one after another. I figured how many people in Congress, they all had to take a trip to Hawaii before we got statehood. But the student, the student government was very active in promoting statehood for Hawaii. And our principal speaker, at that time was... what was she, a freshman or a sophomore? Patsy Mink, Patsy Takemoto at that time. Patsy was very effective. I saw her perform as a Maui High School senior in the territorial oratorical contest, I can just picture, I can still see Patsy on the McKinley High School auditorium where the contest was held, very dramatically giving her spiel. But anyway, Patsy appeared before the Congressional committee. And she was so effective the Hawaii Statehood Commission decided to send her to Washington, D.C., to testify. Anyway, Patsy never came back, then she went to University of Chicago, and all that.

MM: The rest is history, for her.

RK: Yeah. But we were very active in that. But also, at the urging, I think, of Allan Saunders, one of the projects that we ran at the ASUH was a constitutional convention. See, before you become a state you have to have a state constitution, and it's crucial as to what you put into it. And so, we thought this would be good experience for us, would be good for the state, for the public in general to know what some of the issues are, what some of the alternatives might be to different approaches in government. So we had a student constitutional convention, which was very successful. And we came out with our own constitution. So we had projects like that.

Another delightful thing that I recall now, as student body president, I got a call from the U.S. army once. As you might recall, the U.S. army had a, I don't know what you call it, a academic unit or whatever. They were promoting, studying in the field... what do we call it? Well, it's... anyway, the off-campus study, and they had reproduced many classics, Shakespeare, Adam Smith, you know, Freud, all the great works, paperbacks, that they were freely distributing to the troops in the field, I guess, to keep us educated and out of mischief. But when the war ended they had, at Fort Shafter, boxes and boxes of these classics. They wanted to get rid of it, so they called the university. They called us at student government. They said, "Can you do something with this?" I said, "We sure can." So we hauled all of these books and had a great book sale. I think you could have bought (John) Dewey for twenty-five, ten cents or twenty-five cents. But it was some of the good things we could do.

MM: So you're a junior at UH, you're involved in student government, and involved in very meaningful endeavors, i.e. statehood. You are engaged at that time with Mildred. What did you want to be at that point? What did you see in your future?

RK: Well, it was still a toss-up between being a lawyer and being a professor, although it was much later that I gave the professor side more and more serious consideration.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.