Posted on: Sunday, January 30, 2005

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

Rick Bissen doesn't talk much about himself without talking about his family. You get to know him through stories of his grandparents' lu'au business, his parents' taro patch, his 55 first cousins and the hope all these relatives placed squarely on his shoulders.

Bissen's name has been in the news often over the years, prosecuting Maui's most high-profile criminal cases, serving as Gov. Linda Lingle's deputy state attorney general, then stepping in as director of the state Department of Public Safety last year.

Still, he says his 16-year-old daughter's name is in the newspaper much more than his, especially during volleyball season. She's an all-star athlete and honor student at Kamehameha Schools-Maui and a member of the school's first class of students.

"I'm in awe of my kids," Bissen says. "I'm their biggest fan."

If his nomination to be 2nd Circuit Court judge is confirmed by the state Senate next month, Bissen will go home to Maui — back to the island where taro patches paid for his education, back to the place where his three daughters were born, back to the sands where his mother and father lived and died and spent years struggling to give him an education. Back to Maui, as if he's being called home. Bissen, 42, chuckles at this idea, "Yes," he says. "It's personal."

"Both my parents grew up in very big and very poor families. In my dad's family, there were 11 kids. My mom's family had nine of them. They never had the kinds of opportunities I had. For them, I could not fail. That wasn't an option."

Childhood weekends were spent working in the family's taro patch in Kahakuloa, planting, harvesting and doing all the cleaning in the months in between.

"When everybody else was watching cartoons on Saturdays, I was sitting in our Dodge Colt riding on the winding, bumpy road to Kahakuloa," Bissen says. "Those were formative years. I didn't realize it at the time. My father would say, 'You know boy, we sell this taro, this is how we pay for you to go to Saint Anthony.' "

The family also worked at his grandparents' lu'au business, Nakoa's Catering. They cooked, set up, served and cleaned. The pork came from pigs the family raised and the poi was hand-made. His mother and uncle would play music and his three sisters would be called up to dance hula.

"This was in the days when they had table service, where the whole crowd waited outside and when the doors opened, you could just rush to the seats and all the food would be set. In those days, there was bottled soda, and I was the soda guy. Before the doors opened, we went around and put all the sodas on the table, then we walked around with the containers and picked up all the empties. Some guy would always go, 'Boy! What you get over there?' 'I get Sprite, Coke ... ' 'Go get me strawberry.' 'OK, I'll be right back, sir.' And I would think, 'Some day, that guy is going to be sitting in my jury.' "

He knew from an early age he wanted to be an attorney. By the time he graduated from high school, he had a specific goal: deputy prosecutor for the County of Maui. He reached that goal just eight years later. When he was 33, he became Maui's prosecutor.

It was the kind of career his father, a heavy equipment operator and 24-year Army veteran, always wanted for him.

"My father would say to me 'Son, you will never do this kind of work, driving heavy equipment. You will work in an office.' And I would think 'Yeah, but you still dragging me through the taro patch.' And he would say, 'That's to pay for your education.' "

His mother, Edna Nakoa Bissen, a Women's Army Corps veteran, made it clear that hard work was expected at school as well as in the lo'i.

"I distinctly remember being at the Saint Anthony library looking at my grades. That's how we got our report cards. You had to come with your parents, sit in there, you sit at the table and open them and look at them. We went to Tasty Crust afterward. That was the big night out. I had all A's and one B. And my mom says, 'How did you get the B?' She was that way. She was not going to let me slip."

When football and friends and girls vied for his attention, Edna Bissen kept his focus sharp and his mission clear: He was going to college. The family was counting on him.

The message was "make the family proud," but it was stated in a much more humble way: "Don't make the family shame."

"When I was in college in Santa Clara, they were paying my tuition and I had maxed my student loan. My dad would get laid off for a couple of months from construction work and I would say 'I think I'd better sit out this semester. You folks are struggling.' My mom would say 'No, no, we're doing fine. We're doing fine.' I know they were eating pork and beans for dinner every night while I was up there. They just kept making sacrifice after sacrifice."

Their investments paid off.

When Bissen was growing up, his extended family all looked up to an uncle who became an officer with HPD.

Now, Rick Bissen holds that place of regard in the family.

Of his 55 first cousins, he was the first to graduate from a college on the Mainland.

"In fact, the first person to call when the judicial nomination was announced was a younger cousin of mine who said, 'Brah, I read the story in the newspaper and I can't tell you how proud I am.' That meant a lot to me."

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.