O’ahu-based author Richard Halloran’s new book “Sparky: Warrior, Peacemaker, Poet, Patriot A Portrait of Senator Spark M. Matsunaga” is scheduled for release on Friday by Watermark Publishing in Honolulu. The new book tells about the life of the late U.S.
O’ahu-based author Richard Halloran’s new book “Sparky: Warrior, Peacemaker, Poet, Patriot A Portrait of Senator Spark M. Matsunaga” is scheduled for release on Friday by Watermark Publishing in Honolulu.
The new book tells about the life of the late U.S. Sen. Spark M. Matsunaga, who grew up on Kaua’i’s Westside.
In this excerpt from the book, author Halloran tells how Matsunaga overcame poverty to attend the University of Hawai’i at Manoa by winning a subscription contest held by The Garden Island in 1937.
After working for four years in the Mikado store in Hanapepe, Sparky caught a break. The Garden Island weekly newspaper announced in March, 1937, that it was holding a contest to see who could sell the most subscriptions over the next four months. First prize would be $1000, second $750, and third $250, plus cash prizes and commissions of 50 cents a subscription each Saturday.
How a newspaper on an island of 30,000 people that sold for five cents a copy or $2.50 a year could put up more than $2000 in prize money defies explanation, but microfilmed copies of the paper in the Kaua’i Community College library say it was so. The newspaper reported that $1000 would buy a new car with money left over, pay for a small business, or make a large down payment on a home. In year 2002 dollars, that $1000 would probably be worth $23,250.
What caught Sparky’s eye: “It would buy a lot of education at the University of Hawai’i.” Sparky had graduated from high school four years before and was eager to go to college but his family lacked even the modest sum needed to pay in-state tuition at the University of Hawai’i.
By early April, Sparky and 15 other men and women had entered the contest even as they pursued their regular jobs. At the end of the month, Sparky was in fourth place with the newspaper carrying front page stories to promote the contest. In mid-May, Sparky was in third place, then in second in early June.
The newspaper moved the goal posts in mid-June, extending the race to August 24. Spark fell to third place where he held until the Fourth of July, when he jumped into first. He slipped back to second in early August, took the lead with a week to go, and held on to win.
The August 31 issue of The Garden Island printed a picture of a shirt-sleeved Sparky on the front page accepting a check from the newspaper’ s publisher, C.J. Fern.
Having been a mainstay in the family finances, Sparky gave his parents $600 and begged them to let him go to the University of Hawai’i. They agreed. He put $400 in his pocket and, since time was short to get to the university before the school year opened, threw his belongings, which were rather meager anyway, into a suitcase and caught the weekly overnight packet boat Waialeale from Nawiliwili to Honolulu. He rode on the deck with the cargo after paying a fare of $4.
It seems to have been the first time Sparky was off the island of Kaua’i and, though he did not know it then, he would never go back there to live. “When I sailed on the old inter-island steamship from Kaua’i to Honolulu,” Sparky said years later, “I felt like Columbus embarking for the New World.”
