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Daniel Inouye
Medal of Honor
I had no idea. When we got on the ship to go to California, it was my first trip outside Hawaii. We had no idea where we were headed for. When we got to Oakland the word came down we were going to Mississippi. And the only thing that most of us could think about in Mississippi was what we read. They lynch people there. That's what you read in the papers. So the outlook wasn't that good. We got on the train, and we were told that whenever we approached a city, a word will come down and we bring down the shade. Understandably, because if we went through this railroad station and the shades were up, and people looked in and saw me, they would think I'm a prisoner of war. I look Asian. So they thought the best way to avoid problems is to lock up the train, and we would lift up the shades when we left the town or the village or the city. So we saw beautiful America -- Grand Canyon and places like that. But when we got to Mississippi -- this must have been about five days later -- we expected the worst, and lo and behold, there were about 50 women lined up at the train station in gray Red Cross uniforms. They were all white women. And it was quite an eye-opener, because in Hawaii I had never been served by a white woman. Most of the waitresses and waiters where I went to dine, the little coffee shops and such, were all Japanese or Chinese or Filipinos. So this was elegant white ladies serving us coffee and donuts. And then, later on, several families opened their farms and invited us to come over. But the real kicker was the U.S.O. About a month after we arrived there, they sent an invitation: "We're having a dance for you. So if you're interested, we'll be at this auditorium," what have you. And I decided I'd go. My first dance was with a blonde! Never had one before. That's achievement! When you consider coming up with the background I had, it was an achievement. How can you ever forget that? It was very pleasant. It gave us a little drive that America wasn't bad, even if they declared that I was an enemy alien. And I was an enemy alien until the end of the war.
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Daniel Inouye
Medal of Honor
Daniel Inouye: It's a dream where you live a life that's powerful, one in which you can get married if you want to, raise kids if you want to, get educated to the limit of your capacity, and do what makes you happy, because we all are looking for the good life. We don't want to go through life with just fighting, fighting, fighting. I've gone through life. I got into Congress when we had just started Vietnam. Before that, I had friends going to Korea. My brothers went to Korea. And these were war after war after war. Today, we have a powerful military that serves as a deterrent, but the enemy we have today is not like World War II, where you sign a piece of paper and the war is over. Today they're not in uniform. In my time we knew what the enemy looked like, we knew his weapons systems and such. Today, your cab driver may be the person, you have no idea. I don't know how we got into this fix, but we're there.
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Donald Johanson
Discoverer of Lucy
There are some people in the field of anthropology who were stunned when these discoveries were made, and really stunned by the assertions which I made as a young scholar because I named a new species of human ancestor. I redrew the geometry of the family tree and overturned views of human origins which had been strongly held by individuals for, some of them, up to half a century. There was resentment that this young upstart came along, stumbled across this skeleton in the desert and now makes these tremendous assertions. And I think now, after more than a decade of debate and controversy, most of my ideas, many of my ideas, are accepted by a great majority of anthropologists. But there has been a long period of debate, a long period of controversy. And there certainly has been a certain degree of jealously, where people are stunned. "How could this person have made these discoveries? Why wasn't it me? Why didn't it happen to me?" And that has generated, unfortunately, a certain degree of jealousy.
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Chuck Jones
Animation Pioneer
The remarkable thing, I think, about all creative endeavors, whether it be music, or art, or writing, or anything else is that it is not competitive, except with yourself. And all business, and all manufacturing, and everything that's presented to the public is competitive. They are trying to present the same object perhaps under a different name to supersede the other person and it's competitive, it's a foot race. But art can't be.
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