Disaster accentuates legacy of Hawai'i hero
| • | Haunting memories revisit Kona |
By Beverly Creamer and Scott Ishikawa
Advertiser Staff Writers
The loss of the space shuttle Columbia brought forth memories in Hawai'i about the previous shuttle disaster, which claimed a native son who was the first astronaut of Asian ancestry.
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Ellison S. Onizuka was Hawai'i's hero, a man who served as an inspiration for children to reach beyond themselves, to push past the boundaries of little towns and country schools. While the rest of the country had focused in 1986 on schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe being part of the Challenger crew, Hawai'i was fixated on Onizuka.
Ellison S. Onizuka was a Hawai'i-born astronaut who died in the Challenger explosion in January 1986.
"He pushed space travel and science," said 76-year-old Norman Sakata, Onizuka's Holualoa scoutmaster and mentor, "but more importantly, he pushed kids to dream."
David Oue, now a 30-year-old Air Force captain who is satellite operations crew commander at Shriever Air Force Base in Colorado, watched Onizuka lift off in his first shuttle mission in 1985 as a guest of the Onizuka family in Florida. Oue, an impressionable 12-year-old at the time, wanted to be like him, and is now living that legacy.
"It makes it a lot more personal to people in Hawai'i knowing that we suffered the same tragedy 17 years ago and seeing it again," said Oue yesterday from Colorado Springs. "This has brought back a lot of memories. Obviously back then it was a little closer to home."
Despite yesterday's setback, Oue still hopes someday to join the astronaut program.
"There's always that inherent risk in anything, especially something that's as dangerous as this," he said. "But that's just part of the job. If you're not willing to accept that risk, it's probably not something you should try for."
As information about the Columbia disaster unfolded yesterday, the bad memories returned.
"Every time the Challenger anniversary is brought up, I don't like talking about what happened that day," said Sakata. "I try to focus more on Ellison's accomplishments and the legacy he left behind."
Former Gov. George Ariyoshi, who was in his office when Onizuka died, and who mourned him as a friend, said Ellison was a person whose fame and accomplishments never made him change.
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"He was a country boy, and he remained a country boy," said Ariyoshi, from Virginia last night. "When he came back to Hawai'i he'd say 'I want to go to the schools,' and when we'd pass a school he'd just stop and go and visit. He wanted to inspire. He wanted them to know that even someone from a country town in Hawai'i can have dreams come true."
Flowers adorn the grave of Ellison S. Onizuka at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.
In Kona, Susie Weaver turned away from the television, just as she had in 1986, refusing to watch images of the Challenger explosion 73 seconds after it lifted off from Cape Canaveral in a bitter cold snap. Freezing temperatures that had swept Florida that January led to heat leakage past the O-rings to cause the explosion.
"That's the first thing I flashed back on," said Weaver, "what happened to us and our big loss. It does touch people here. We've all internalized it very personally."
Weaver's son, Pablo, now a 26-year-old graduate student working toward his master's degree at the University of Colorado in Boulder — Onizuka's school — won one of the Konawaena High School Onizuka Scholarships offered annually by the astronaut's class of 1964.
Pablo Weaver was a sixth-grader when he went to space camp for the first time, motivated by a talk Onizuka gave to his Na'alehu Elementary School class.
"He was definitely inspired," said his mother. "He went to space camp and space academy." And when he started college, Weaver specialized in astronomy and physics, later switching to environmental biology, with a minor in astronomy.
In death, the Onizuka legacy lives on. Because of scholarships founded in his memory, students who might not have had the opportunity are able to study science or graduate from college. At the Kona airport, the Ellison Onizuka Space Center was built in his memory and the Mauna Kea midlevel astronomy facilities on the Big Island were also named after him.
But his legacy is also about humility and hard work and the tenacity to follow your dreams. Though he grew up picking coffee beans on his father's coffee farm, he shot off his first toy rocket at age 5 under the family home built on stilts behind the Onizuka Store that served the little town of Keopu.
Sometimes, when he should have been helping with the harvest, he'd lie among the coffee plants and dream of going to the stars.
"I couldn't talk about it at the time because nobody really knew what space was," he was quoted as saying a year before his death. "Monkeys, not men, were being launched into orbit then."
Just months before he strapped himself into the shuttle Challenger as it sat on the Florida launch pad, he told an Advertiser reporter that to go into space meant to live with the fear, but to put it aside, and to take certain precautions like pulling important papers together, so your family could go on if the unimaginable occurred.
"You launch, not knowing exactly what is going to happen," he said. "And that is the challenge you have to take. ... You can always plan for what you expect to see, but the unknown is always there."
