HONOLULU (AP) — Jim Becker, a world-traveling journalist who lined Jackie Robinson’s big-league baseball debut and the U.S. Military’s retaking of Seoul throughout the Korean Battle, died Friday. He was 98.
He died of pure causes at a Honolulu hospital, mentioned his goddaughter Carla Escoda Brooks.
Becker served as an Related Press bureau chief in Manila, New Delhi and Honolulu and lined Margaret Thatcher as a contract journalist in London. However he mentioned his most vital story was about an underdog Hawaii highschool soccer staff that gained a league championship, a story he instructed as a Honolulu Star-Bulletin columnist.
Becker joined the AP in 1946 recent out of the Military when he walked into the wire service’s New York headquarters with out an appointment and was employed to begin the subsequent day.
He watched Robinson develop into the primary Black participant on a Main League baseball staff when editors despatched him to the trailblazing athlete’s first sport as a Brooklyn Dodger.
Practically half of Robinson’s teammates had signed a petition as a result of they didn’t wish to play with a Black man. However the stadium crowd was supportive of Robinson, Becker mentioned, including that half of Brooklyn was Jewish “and they knew a little something about prejudice.”
Becker, who was simply 20 on the time, received quotes from Robinson within the clubhouse and ran them as much as the AP staffer writing the story. Becker, in an interview for this obituary, recalled seeing Robinson emerge from the primary base dugout and start to play catch with a participant who unbeknownst to Robinson had signed the petition.
“And I thought, he’s carrying the banner of decency and dignity and fair play and the American promise,” Becker mentioned. “He’s carrying it for all of us in this room, in a stadium … And I thought, he’s carrying it alone.”
From the Korean Battle to the Dalai Lama
Becker was a part of AP’s Newsfeatures staff, which lined the world’s main information tales from a function perspective. In 1950, his editor despatched him to Korea, the place the U.S. and its allies deployed forces to repel an invasion of South Korea by North Korea’s Korean Individuals’s Military.
Becker embedded with the U.S. Marines. Communications had been poor and the Marines used their restricted radio connections for battlefield directions. So Becker typed up his tales and put them within the breast pockets of wounded troops being evacuated for medical remedy. He hooked up notes asking nurses and docs to name the closest Related Press workplace.
“I knew they would go at least to Tokyo and maybe even Honolulu. In fact, one of my stories emerged in Washington. They flew the kid to Bethesda,” he mentioned.
Becker mentioned all his tales made it out — although not fairly so as.
He later embedded with the third Military Division, which recaptured Seoul. He remembered crossing the Han River with seven or eight troopers and different correspondents and strolling round a metropolis deserted by opposing troops.
A gifted storyteller, Becker delighted colleagues together with his recounting of the Dalai Lama’s 1959 entry into Indian exile. Few images existed of the Tibetan non secular chief on the time, and the AP and its then-archrival, United Press Worldwide, raced to transmit the primary footage of his arrival within the northern city of Tezpur. Each AP and UPI chartered planes to Kolkata to hurry their pictures to a “radiophoto” machine that might ship the photographs world wide.
The UPI correspondent received there first after AP’s pilot took a extra circuitous path to keep away from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) airspace as a consequence of India-Pakistan disputes. Quickly Becker started receiving a collection of more and more alarmed cables from AP editors in London informing him that UPI’s Dalai Lama images had been coming in and demanding to know the whereabouts of AP’s.
Becker lastly transmitted AP’s first photograph and feared he was headed for a profession change. “I can see I’m going to be on the night desk in Des Moines,” Becker mentioned.
Then editors cabled once more: “URGENT BECKER UPI DALAI LAMA FULL HAIRED. OUR DALAI LAMA SHORN CLARIFY URGENTLY. AP PHOTOS LONDON.”
“And I realized that God may have given me a chicken pilot, but he made up for it by assigning the only correspondent in Asia who was so stupid he didn’t know what the Dalai Lama looked like and who had sent three radiophotos of the Indian interpreter,” Becker mentioned.
‘The most important story I ever wrote’
Within the Nineteen Sixties, the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin lured Becker from AP to be a columnist, clearing the way in which for what Becker known as “the most important story I ever wrote.”
It depicted the soccer staff from Farrington Excessive College — which served the hardscrabble Honolulu neighborhood of Kalihi — as they triumphed over a rich non-public college rival, Kamehameha, within the 1965 league championship.
The staff’s volunteer bus drivers all had day jobs driving metropolis rubbish vans. Their coach was a service provider seaman who missed ships throughout soccer season. Some gamers didn’t have something to eat for breakfast or lunch. When their coach discovered, he had the college cafeteria save unused milk and acquired gamers cereal.
Becker tagged alongside to a Waikiki lodge the place the coach put the staff the night time earlier than the large sport to get them away from playing and distractions at house. Becker detailed the gamers carrying their dishes to the kitchen at a restaurant after they had been performed consuming. And the way the captain led the staff in prayer, asking for steering and for nobody to be injured — both on their very own staff or the opposing aspect.
State Rep. Gregg Takayama, a 1970 graduate of Farrington and a former Star-Bulletin reporter, mentioned the column was a supply of delight for Kalihi. Again then — and to some extent now — information protection of Kalihi targeted on violence, medication and gangs.
“The message of the story really was that, no matter your beginnings, as humble as they may be, you can do great things,” Takayama mentioned. “And that is what was shown in the story through the team bonding, the fact that they worked as a real team in every sense of the word and made something great out of themselves.”
For many years afterward, folks approached Becker to inform him how a lot the story meant to them or that that they had a framed copy hanging of their house.
Becker’s spouse of 60 years, Betty Hanson Becker, died in 2008. They did not have youngsters however grew to become godparents to Brooks, her sister Cristina Escoda and her cousin Maria Teresa Roxas once they had been youngsters and Brooks’ and Escoda’s father was Becker’s colleague within the Manila bureau. Becker is survived by Brooks and her husband Peter Brooks, Escoda and Roxas.
