IN JUNE 1947, ONLY WEEKS AFTER returning home, Ben entered the University of Nebraska as a student on the GI Bill. His brothers, older and younger, had attended the university before him, but none of them got the attention that Ben received. The university chancellor personally welcomed Ben to campus, invited him to his office for a chat, and posed for photographs.
A reporter at the Lincoln Evening Journal got wind of the presence of the renowned war hero who had enrolled in the summer session and arranged an interview. “You might say that Ben, one of America’s most heavily decorated war heroes, is back home and broke,” the reporter began his article.13 Ben was honest about his tight finances. He expected to “sweat out” four years of college. “I doubt that the GI subsistence payments will be enough to see us through,” he said. “One of these days, we’ll be needing a washing machine and a lot of stuff like that. Anyway, I’m going to get a part-time job somewhere.”
The reference to a washing machine was a scoop for the reporter: Shige was expecting their first child.
Ben freely admitted that he had hoped to have a greater impact on American attitudes with his crusade. “It was a pretty thankless undertaking,” he said. “It was discouraging.” But he hadn’t abandoned his hope of fostering change in America. With encouragement from Cal Stewart, Ben had decided that a career in journalism, rather than farming, would give him a voice in the struggle for America’s soul.
Whatever his disappointments, Ben didn’t regret devoting the past two years of his life to challenging Americans to broaden their minds on matters of race and justice. “I’d do the same thing over again,” he declared. He had given everything he could to his Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour. Posing for a photographer with textbooks tucked under his right arm, Ben was off and running in his new quest to serve his country through the pursuit of journalism.
The shy Nebraska farm boy had become a celebrated war hero, inspirational speaker, progressive crusader, aspiring journalist, husband, and father-to-be. The war was over, and Ben Kuroki had found his path in peace.
Chapter 53
PUBLISHER, REPORTER, EDITOR
In the spring of 1950, with Shige now caring for a pair of baby girls, Ben prepared to graduate from the University of Nebraska with a degree in journalism. He had gotten some hands-on experience at Cal Stewart’s weekly paper in O’Neill, and he was inspired. He could have applied for a reporting position with one of the big papers in Lincoln or Omaha, or sought a job with a smaller paper around the state. But Ben had bigger plans. He wanted to follow in his friend’s footsteps and publish his own local newspaper.
With Shige’s blessing, Ben scouted the area and discovered that the longtime owner of a weekly paper in the town of York, fifty miles west of Lincoln, was ready to retire. Within a week, and without discussing his plan with Cal Stewart, Ben took out a loan and signed the papers to buy the York Republican and its antiquated printing presses.
Ben was a newspaper publisher. And then it hit him: Now what?
In his college journalism classes, Ben had learned how to report and write and edit a newspaper story. But he had only a vague idea of what being a small-town weekly publisher entailed. As the publisher of the York Republican, he would be in competition with an established daily newspaper owned by a statewide chain. The can-do self-confidence he had honed in the military had served him well in combat, but now, with his family’s future on the line, those defining traits had led him out on a limb.
Ben drove the 150 miles to O’Neill to lay out his predicament to his friend.
Stewart put the word out to Nebraska newspaper friends, many of them World War II veterans themselves. Within a week, more than forty ink-stained community newspaper publishers and editors converged on York to undertake what Stewart dubbed Operation Democracy. They sold ads, reported and wrote stories, and designed pages. They had initially planned a special edition of eighteen pages, but Stewart’s squadron sold so many ads that the number of pages spiraled. By the time the special Operation Democracy Edition of the York Republican hit the streets on June 8, 1950, the community could peruse forty pages of news, sports, editorials, features, and photographs.1
Word spread beyond Nebraska of the extraordinary launch of the Nisei war hero’s newspaper career. Ben had kept a low profile since ending his Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour and returning to Nebraska in the spring of 1947. Now he was once again the hot interview sought by journalists from national publications such as Time and Life, the New York Times, and state and regional newspapers.
Some of the reporters asked Ben why he had chosen small-town life over a city. “I wanted to go someplace where I could find security, a home where my kids would be respected,” he told a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I just wanted to be accepted by the community and live in peace.”2
Ben seemed to feel the need to reassure his local readers that he didn’t buy the paper as a platform for his Fifty-Ninth Mission crusade. “The story has gone out that I wanted a paper as an organ to keep up my fight against intolerance, but that’s not the point at all,” Ben said. “Of course, the paper will be against such things, as any good newspaper should be, but all I want is to put out a good community newspaper.”3
Heartened by the support of his fellow journalists, Ben was also relieved by the local reception he received. York residents had warmly welcomed Ben, Shige, and their two daughters. “It almost scares me,” Ben said, “because it seems almost too good to be true.”4
A full-page story about Operation Democracy in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on June 18 called the launch “the last chapter in the story of Ben Kuroki.”
But Operation Democracy would prove to be only the first in a series of extraordinary chapters in Ben’s postwar life.5
AS BEN FEARED, THE MAGICAL START of his newspaper career was too good to be true.
Only a month after the Operation Democracy launch, on Saturday evening, July 8, Ben and Shige were entertaining one of Ben’s war friends at the local country club when an unusually heavy summer rain fell. It kept falling, and within hours York was inundated with a record thirteen inches of rain. The Blue River burst its banks. When Ben ventured out into the night with his staff photographer to report on the freak floodwaters, his car got washed away. By Sunday, a good portion of York had experienced heavy damage.6
Cal Stewart once again rallied community newspaper editors to give Ben a hand with the publication of a special flood edition.7 Ben survived the flood, but it was a harbinger of the hard times ahead. The financial challenge of making the York Republican a viable enterprise proved too great, even with a $10,000 loan from his younger brother Fred.8 After eighteen months, Ben surrendered to a challenge for one of the few times in his life. On January 11, 1952, he announced the sale of the York Republican.9
He was closemouthed about his next move, but he turned up in Shige’s home state of Idaho within a few months as editor and part-owner of another weekly newspaper, the Blackfoot Bulletin. After more than two years in Idaho, Ben left that venture and returned to Nebraska to take a job as a reporter with the North Platte Telegraph-Bulletin.
If Ben felt deflated, his work for the Telegraph-Bulletin didn’t show it. The paper published his first bylined story on December 22, 1954: “Fair Skies, Rising Mercury Greet First Day of Winter,” read the headline. “White Christmas Unlikely.” Ben had learned his craft well, and the article was solidly reported and concisely written. Over the months that followed, he wrote stories about such varied topics as the subzero camping trip of local Boy Scouts, the retirement of a beloved parks commissioner, and the poignant naturalization ceremony for three local residents.
Nearly exactly a year after hiring Ben, the North Platte paper broke the news of their restless reporter’s next move. “Ben Kuroki, courthouse and police reporter for the Telegraph-Bulletin since Nov. 27, 1954, left Saturday to take over as editor and publisher of the Williamston, Michigan, Enterprise, which he has purchased,” the story reported.
Ben’s Michigan sojourn spanned a decade. In October 1957, he added to his journalistic empire in the suburbs of Michigan’s state capital by starting a tabloid weekly in a nearby township. Once again, Fred chipped in $10,000 to help his big brother realize his dreams.
In 1960, the Detroit Free Press published a profile on the Lansing-area newspaper publisher with a fascinating back story. Ben was now forty-three years of age and his wiry frame had filled out. He wore his hair in a military-style crew cut, smoked cigars, and read with the aid of horn-rimmed glasses. He had become an avid golfer and served on the board of directors of his local country club. He dabbled in local politics, winning a seat on the Williamston City Council. He was a member of a local Methodist church, and he and Shige now had three daughters: Kerry, Kristyn, and Julie.
The Free-Press story revealed another interesting twist in Ben’s life. His certified public accountant happened to be his former B-29 pilot in the Pacific, Jim Jenkins, who lived in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac. “Jim tells me that I’m a good editor, but I’m not so hot as a businessman,” Ben quipped.10 It sounded like a joke, but Ben knew it was also true.
As a spunky small-town newspaper editor, Ben had found his footing. He wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers with tough editorials. At one point, the Williamston City Council voted 4–3 to demand an apology from their local newspaper publisher for a critical editorial deemed unfair by the offended council members. Ben refused and responded directly to his readers in another editorial. “There will be no apologies in the battle for your right to know,” Ben wrote.11
In 1964, twenty years after Ben’s tour of the incarceration camps, the Japanese American Citizens League honored him for his postwar crusade against intolerance at the group’s nineteenth biennial convention in Detroit. “People were gripped by wartime hysteria,” Ben told a reporter from the Detroit Free Press, trying to explain how the liberal Franklin Roosevelt and his Democratic administration came to round up 110,000 people of Japanese descent and confine them to camps. “Propaganda whipped them up.”12
That same year, Ben revealed his deepening conservatism by endorsing Republican Barry Goldwater for the presidency in a signed column. Goldwater lost in a landslide.
By 1965, labor troubles and tight finances had brought Ben and Shige to the brink once again. In April, they abruptly announced the sale of their two weekly newspapers in the Lansing suburbs and revealed plans to relocate to the West Coast. The family’s move to California may have held deeper considerations for Ben and Shige. Their children were growing up in a place almost completely disconnected from their Asian ancestry, and Ben and Shige saw the move to California as a way to change that dynamic.13
Ben wasn’t unemployed for long. Southern California’s Ventura County Star-Free Press hired him as an editor, and he began a long and successful tenure with the paper. He was a copy editor, edited the Sunday magazine, and eventually became news editor. While editing and writing stories for the paper, he explored the state that once had been the bastion of anti-Japanese sentiment in America. He camped in the High Sierra near Yosemite, fished for albacore off the Ventura coast, and watched his daughters excel in their various endeavors before they headed off to California universities in pursuit of their dreams.
In 1982, at the age of sixty-five, Ben retired from journalism.
At no point since Pearl Harbor had he experienced such a sudden and disorienting transition. He had a national speaking tour lined up when he left the army in 1946, and then he had college and his journalism career ahead of him. Now he went to work part-time at a golf shop in Ventura, played golf with his buddies and bridge with Shige, and kept in touch with his girls and their lives. But ghosts from the past were stirring.
As with many of his peers, the passage of decades and advancing age increasingly rekindled memories of the war, the terrors of combat and the beauties of comradeship long past. Most veterans hadn’t overcome the challenges that Ben had faced, or achieved his fame, and those realities would bring both joy and pain to Ben’s life. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack looming in 1991, the shadow of World War II once again fell over Ben.
Chapter 54
HIDDEN HEROES