To call Dalton Tanonaka "former newscaster and Republican candidate" seems wrong somehow. Those terms are correct, but incomplete, particularly for those of us who remember when it was a big, big deal to see a local guy anchoring the news.

He was not the first, but he was one of the first to sit in that esteemed spot that had belonged only to white men from the Mainland. And then he topped that. He went international. He represented what was possible at a time when we were told that anything was possible but we had little reason to believe.

The archive of newspaper clippings on Tanonaka tell the tale of a bright, personable local boy who played ball at Kalani, worked summers at both Honolulu papers and got scholarships to study journalism on the Mainland.

"Former Kalani soccer and football player Dalton Tanonaka has been involved in activities other than sports at Mesa College," a clip from July 1976 said. "Dalton was the editor of the school's newspaper and won five individual awards at the recent Rocky Mountain Collegiate Press association conference in Tucson. An accomplished stage actor, he's headed for Northern Illinois on a journalism scholarship this fall."

"Handsome Dalton Tanonaka, former Kalani footballer and sterling captain of the Tiser's softball team, has been awarded $1,000 by the National Radio and TV News Directors Foundation. He'll be attending Northern Illinois University," read a clip from August 1977.

His own writing is there as well. In his early years as a print reporter, he worked in sports and also did investigative reports on Japanese tourists getting gouged in Waikiki. He walked a neighborhood with a Jehovah's Witness and described what that was like.

And in January 1979, he wrote a column about growing up in the TV generation when no one on television looked like him:

"When Beaver Cleaver went shopping with his mother, they never stopped to buy a bottle of kim chee.

"Those nice people, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, wore their shoes inside the house.

"On 'Father Knows Best,' Jim and Margaret Anderson never had to sell huli-huli chicken to raise money for Bud's little league team.

"What we saw was what we didn't get."

But he changed that. He went to work in local television as a reporter. He then moved on to bigger jobs in bigger markets in Denver and Portland. In 1981 when Joe Moore was promoted from sportscaster to news anchor after Paul Udell went to Chicago, an Advertiser columnist wrote, "Might Dalton Tanonaka have gotten the job if he hadn't moved to Denver a couple of weeks ago?"

And then he managed that career move that all locals who go away to the Mainland dream of: He came home triumphant, anchoring the evening news. At one point, he was the only male Asian-American news anchor in the entire country.

"I went to that distant land called the 'Mainland' for the first time on an eighth-grade Pop Warner football trip," he wrote in that 1979 piece. "The place was California, the people looked and acted like Donna Reed's family, and the snow in the mountains was real. I had crossed over to the other side of the screen of our old RCA black-and-white. It was neat."

He kept reaching. "Japan Business Today" in Tokyo. CNN International in Hong Kong. Then home again to try another local triumph: a run for lieutenant governor; a run for Congress.

So what happened? What happened to this local guy who seemed to be able to live in both worlds, to dine with dignitaries and play softball with the Kalani boys?

Did he bend under the weight of expectations? Was he burned by the fire of ambition, both his and, vicariously, ours?

There is no going back, and "if only" never fixes anything. There is only an adjudication and a sentence and moving on.

Tanonaka will have to make his way anew, and we will have to carefully choose another to carry our dreams over to the other side, because in truth, it is still too rare for a local kid to cross into that world, to hold on to that place once it is attained, and to cross back unscathed.

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