By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Scoops Casey made the front page yesterday, where she belonged. She did it the hard way, as usual. That's what separated her from the crowd. She would have preferred to write a best seller.

This is the lady who introduced me to dimensions of Hawai'i that run deep. The engine in Scoops is the one that created people like Jack Burns and Dan Inouye. Her dream was the one that brought Hawai'i statehood.

Newspaper readers knew her as Scoops Casey, the stunt lady who rode in fire trucks. It was her means of escape from the prison of her sex and race. How else could a Japanese woman grab the attention of an editor? It's not easy to move out of the backshop into the newsroom.

What made Scoops a class act was her heart. Flash back to October 1951. A green-as-grass reporter from the Dust Bowl bounced into the newsroom, naive and friendless. A plump, pretty proofreader took him in hand.

Understand, there had been no Japanese in the Dust Bowl. This was the first Asian woman the fugitive had met. She was intelligent, kindly and very much in tune with the world. The proofreader was Scoops, and the Dust Bowl fugitive was me. She was the first person to befriend me in Our Honolulu. Scoops introduced me to the cultural complexity of Hawai'i that captured my soul.

She invited me to 'Aina Haina, where she and her husband, Brian, a reporter of Irish descent, had bought a new tract house. We talked about writing because, at the time, I intended to write the great American novel. Scoops also burned to write. I wasn't the first lonely, wannabe novelist she had befriended.

At the University of Hawai'i, she had noticed a GI from Schofield Barracks in her writing class. Naturally, Scoops took him in hand. They talked about the great books they were going to write. His name was James Jones. After the war, he wrote "From Here to Eternity."

And he put her in his book under her real name, Tsuneko Oguri. But in the book he turned her into a prostitute, for which he later apologized.

That's what Scoops had to put up with. As a proofreader, she became the darling of Edna Mae "Ma" Lawson, the society editor of The Advertiser and self-appointed arbiter of art, drama and literature in town. Asian brides never appeared on the front page of the society section.

There was a double wage scale for Asian and haole reporters. To Ma Lawson, Scoops was her token Asian. She gave Scoops her cast-off clothing. Scoops was too polite to refuse.

Ma would have been horrified if she'd known that Scoops admired Jack Hall, the labor leader. She had no idea that Scoops discussed Island politics with intensity and in-depth knowledge. Scoops was the generation that created the Democratic revolution in the 1954 Legislature. Don't be fooled by riding in fire trucks. There's more than one way to get where you want to go.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.