| Abstrakt: |
I FIRST MET ELLISON ONIZUKA IN SAN Francisco in November 1979. He was then a young United States Air Force captain on a public relations tour for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and we had been booked on the same radio show. I watched him struggle to answer what he must have been asked umpteen times: ''Captain Onizuka, how does it feel to be the first Japanese-American astronaut?'' After the program, Ellison and I shared a cab back to the hotel. He was worried that he hadn't done well at the interview, that he never knew how to answer questions about how he felt as a Japanese-American. Was a Japanese-American supposed to feel differently from any other kind? We had a drink together before he had to catch a flight back to Houston, and he told me how he had wanted to become an astronaut ever since, as a teen-ager in Hawaii in the early 1960's, he had watched the fledgling Mercury space program flights. We talked about our families, and I remember feeling I had embarrassed him a little by telling him how excited my stepson, Derek, then 7, would be that I had met a real astronaut. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
