Page 2 - MidWeek - July 27, 2022

2 MIDWEEK JULY 27, 2022
Reaching Out Matters
“Every individual matters.” — Jane Goodall
IFuture’s Past
While clearing out drawers in prepa- ration for my family’s move from Nuʻua- nu to our permanent home in Mānoa, bits of our lives that I came across reminded me of my first job after graduat- ing college. I was 20 years old and worked as a research assistant for an attorney for the German Consulate in New York. I would take the subway to Lower Manhattan to a warehouse filled with possessions of immigrants to the United States who had later died, often alone. My task was to find the decedents’ relatives, if any existed, who could claim an inheritance.
t’s all spelled out in the article. An incredible opportunity for the state and University of Hawai‘i to become an integral part in the burgeoning world of semiconductors,
clear: Never take anyone for granted.
optics, alternative energy and computer science. A grand opportunity to plant our flag in development (alongside Sil- icon Valley and other choice locations) of a lucrative, clean, forward-looking, vital industry.
Now settled in Mānoa, I have written my cousin who lost her father and called my aunt whose husband died af- ter contracting COVID-19. I’ve become more conscien- tious in staying in touch with family and friends, and tell- ing my husband and daugh- ter I love them. Whether re- lationships are permanent or evanescent, past or present, reaching out matters.
Rüdiger “Rudy” Herzing Rückmann is a Quaker, poet, and high school program di- rector and lead teacher at the Honolulu Waldorf School.
Chasing The Light is pro- duced by Lynne Johnson and Robin Stephens Rohr.
The article mentions Motorola, Intel, and others looking at UH labs for the best and brightest students along with sharing ideas from top scientists (aka professors) at our world-class university up in the Mānoa hills. The article proffers that UH’s physical electronics labs are superior to those at Cal and Stanford. It sounds so grand, within reach and real! So what happened? Good question. That article by Ray Tsuchiyama, a consultant/adviser/entrepreneur and a Farrington High School graduate, appeared in the Hawai‘i High Tech Journal in the summer of ... 1984.
Reaching out to others — whether family or friends — is important to build and maintain relationships.
who had stayed behind. In the early 1940s, their cor- respondence stopped. In her diary she wrote that she feared she would never see them again. One man hoped to be an actor, found and lost romance, decided on anoth- er career and devoted his life to coaching high school athletes. Honored to witness
SPEED BUMP by Dave Coverly
Was there a lack of political will? A lack of financing or grant opportunities? Were we too fixated on tourism, agri- culture and the military as our big three economic pillars to push the incredible potential of these teaching visionaries and their students? Computer science was already a pretty big deal then, so where was our homegrown Big Brother in 1984 to nurture and push this alternative economic engine forward? Surely people realized the goal to keep our best and brightest home back then, I assume. As an aside, Arkansas is now a leading state in computer science, because it pushed.
I would comb through letters, diaries and other belongings, searching for clues, often absorbed in
paths taken by people I had never met, I celebrated their triumphs, grieved their loss- es, congratulated them on milestones and cried when their stories came to an end.
Can we push harder to bring computer science further along at UH and in our high schools? Perhaps a public-pri- vate partnership? Equitably, pushing merit-based programs. Too much humbug? Robotics have become a big deal in Hawai‘i in this century, true, and maybe the tech boat hasn’t sailed away on microchip design, lab work, electrical en- gineering as a trade, or Hawai‘i in general as a computer sciences center.
how people moved through life. One woman escaped Germany in the late 1930s and sent money to family
When my own fami- ly’s possessions triggered memories of those who had come and gone, the obvious became even more starkly
New Century Schoolbook bold (scaled H 73.6)
with Rüdiger “Rudy” Herzing Rückmann
It might not be worth much, but U.S. News & World Re- port ranks UH-Mānoa tied at No. 135 among colleges/uni- versities in the nation for computer science offerings. Again, this opportunity gone awry is much more complicated than any current numbers, missed opportunities, or even original hopes and realities expressed in a 1984 article. But it is a concrete example where we weren’t just hypothesizing, but were actually succeeding in an area that held great promise for economic diversity and providing well-paying jobs for our own, until it wasn’t.
Think about it ...
john@thinkaboutithawaii.com