Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Books | September/October 2003

Books
By Bob Dye

Hawai'i's Veteran Senator

From Kaua'i to Washington, a well-told political life

Lunch with Sparky in the dining room of the U.S. Senate was a local tradition in which I luckily participated-along with thousands of others. I've forgotten the year, but remember the day of my free lunch. There were two tables filled with folks from Hawai'i, and Sparky was beaming. He surveyed us and joked that other senators always bet on the number of guests he would have for lunch. I think there were at least a couple dozen of us, an entire family on vacation, others in Washington on business. No matter what our purpose for being in the nation's capital, we were all treated as VIPs by the jaunty junior senator from Hawai'i-Spark Masayuki Matsunaga.

The recently published Sparky: Warrior, Peacemaker, Poet, Patriot, by Richard Halloran, recounts the political life of the Kaua'i boy who named himself after a cartoon character in the Barney Google comic strip. Barney was a horse that not only ran last but sometimes in the wrong direction.

Halloran tells us that Matsunaga's Kaua'i playmates dubbed him "Sparky" because he was the slowest runner and the first one thrown out in the game called dodge ball. The nickname stuck; when he was discharged from service in World War II, he legally changed his name to fit what almost everybody now called him. Besides, he had political aspirations: "With a name like Masayuki, I couldn't have been elected dogcatcher."

With a degree from Harvard Law School, the decorated veteran of the 100th Battalion hit the campaign trail. With the keen eye of a journalist, Halloran, a Honolulu Advertiser columnist, documents Sparky's political wins and losses on his way to the Senate.

Sparky died in office on Easter Sunday, April 15, 1990. His Congressional colleague Norman Mineta wrote: "Sparky's ideals will continue to live in us so long as there are wrongs to right, people in need of justice, and a world in need of peace."

Sparky: Warrior, Peacemaker, Poet, Patriot, by Richard Halloran. Watermark Publishing, Honolulu, 2002. $16.95 (paperback).

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