RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesI recently reconnected with an administrator I met while I was in college. And what transpired was a conversation with a man who is living a wonderful philanthropic life.
Herb Yamanaka was an events manager at the University of Oregon back in the mid-1970s. He used to call me “Pineapple,” an inside joke between two people from Hawaii. We’d bump into each other at the UO athletic department while I was a student volunteer and gofer and he was on the athletic staff.
It’s not often one can chat with someone who was born before World War II, had relatives in internment camps, experienced racism for the first time in college, and was in college before Hawaii became a state.
Guess what, that man is still at UO — all 92 years young on Aug. 13 — as an associate athletic director focusing on major donor giving.
Yamanaka is gregarious, humble, benevolent and generous. The Army vet once rejected Nike founder Phil Knight’s open checkbook offer for a memento and was the wingman for legendary former Oregon football coach and athletic director Len Casanova. He enjoys deep-sea fishing, going three times a year. In early August, he landed a bluefin tuna while angling in San Diego.
But little did I know that the Kohala High graduate has maintained a connection to Hawaii by establishing an athletic scholarship for a Hawaii athlete in 1995.
Some of the recipients included future NFL stars Max Unger (he had it for five years) and DeForest Buckner and current Oregon offensive lineman and former Kapaa All-State player Kawika Rogers. Golfers who also were recipients of the Herb & Donna Yamanaka Endowed Athletic Scholarship included Baldwin’s Cassy Isagawa (2010 state champion) and Honokaa’s Sean Maekawa (2007 champion).
“He’s the nicest guy and he’s the perfect person for what he does for the athletic department,” said Maekawa, who is now a golf coach at Hawaii Hilo. “He embodies what the athletic department is about. He’s so friendly … and his positive energy just makes you gravitate towards him. He’s awesome.”
Yamanaka was born in Kailua-Kona in 1934 but moved to Kohala, “where there was more water.” He graduated from Kohala in 1952 but did not play sports.
“I was too slow and too small,” Yamanaka said. “I was a 130-pound senior in high school, 5-foot-3 or 5-4. Now I’m 5-7. I grew while I was in college.”
Said Maekawa: “He was my grandpa’s classmate at Kohala High School. That was pretty cool to have that connection.”
Yamanaka was accepted into the University of Oregon under a reciprocity rule, basically an exchange program where students from Hawaii could go to UO and pay in-state tuition and vice versa.
“My (in-state) tuition was $55 a term ($165 a year for the three terms) and room and board was $72.50 (per month),” he said.
Tuition and fees for residents this academic year is $17,475, according to UO cost of attendance figures. Non-resident tuition costs is $47,466. If you add in on-campus housing and food, that total is $65,649 a year.
It was in college where Yamanaka faced racism for the first time.
“I didn’t know about racism. In Hawaii, you didn’t care if you were Mexican, white, Black, Portuguese, we all worked together.”
But after becoming the first pledge of Asian descent to be accepted into a fraternity (Tau Kappa Epsilon), he was not always welcomed by other frats. He said he was told he could “’come over, but you can’t come in.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ” Yamanaka was told they would stamp his card to show that he was there, but he wasn’t allowed to come in and mingle.
Yamanaka said sports helped quell that for him.
“(It was) about the Rose Bowl time, 1956-57-58, where I felt comfortable, that everybody was equal. We were all yelling together, cheering for the Ducks. … Our players were all different, so it didn’t matter. It just brought camaraderie. So you cheered together, huddled together, you yelled and screamed and partied, so that totally helped.”
He said he should have graduated from Oregon in 1956 but stayed in school, taught chemistry at the school of nursing on campus to pay for classes, and took three hours each term to avoid being drafted into the service.
“In 1958, they caught up with me so I had to go,” he said.
With a degree in biology, Yamanaka went to the “medical research and nutrition laboratory (at Fitzsimons Hospital) in Denver, Colo., working in the pathology department.”
He said he was supposed to get out in two years but was given a project called the Protein Histochemistry of Amyloidosis, finding the amino acids that constituted amyloids that can affect liver, kidney, spleen and other tissues.
“The major said, if you don’t finish this project in time, you’re going to be extended and you’re going to stay in the Army until you finish. So I said, ‘If I finish the project can I get out early?’
“He says, if you finish the project and it’s published you can get out. So in 18 months I get out of the service and published the paper in the pathology journal.”
Yamanaka returned to Eugene, Ore., and started working for the athletic department in 1960 and “stayed here ever since. I’m still here.”
He started as an events manager, and later got promoted to handling football travel for then-coach Casanova and Rich Brooks and all the coaches for 17 years. He’s also worked for 12 UO athletic directors.
He never went back into pathology or research despite his experience and expertise.
“In pathology, I worked with animals that were dead or dying. It was morbid. I looked down a microscope all day, cutting tissues,” he said. “In athletics, there were young 18-, 21-year-old kids, energetic and everything else. It was more (in) my line because I love people.”
The idea behind providing a scholarship to 18- to 21-year-olds, however, might have been planted decades ago.
“My grandmother and grandfather in Kohala raised us during the war till graduation,” he said. “I used to gripe about how strict they were, that we never ate out, never went on vacation.”
“I...
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