HONOLULU – Jim Becker, a world-traveling journalist who coated Jackie Robinson’s big-league baseball debut and the U.S. Military’s retaking of Seoul throughout the Korean Warfare, died Friday. He was 98.
He died of pure causes at a Honolulu hospital, mentioned his goddaughter Carla Escoda Brooks.
Becker served as an Related Press bureau chief in Manila, New Delhi and Honolulu and coated Margaret Thatcher as a contract journalist in London. However he mentioned his most necessary story was about an underdog Hawaii highschool soccer workforce that received a league championship, a story he advised as a Honolulu Star-Bulletin columnist.
Becker joined the AP in 1946 contemporary out of the Military when he walked into the wire service’s New York headquarters with out an appointment and was employed to start out the following day.
He watched Robinson turn out to be the primary Black participant on a Main League baseball workforce when editors despatched him to the trailblazing athlete’s first sport as a Brooklyn Dodger.
Practically half of Robinson’s teammates had signed a petition as a result of they didn’t need to play with a Black man. However the stadium crowd was supportive of Robinson, Becker mentioned, including that half of Brooklyn was Jewish “and so they knew somewhat one thing about prejudice.”
Becker, who was simply 20 on the time, obtained quotes from Robinson within the clubhouse and ran them as much as the AP staffer writing the story. Becker, in an interview for this obituary, recalled seeing Robinson emerge from the primary base dugout and start to play catch with a participant who unbeknownst to Robinson had signed the petition.
“And I assumed, he’s carrying the banner of decency and dignity and truthful play and the American promise,” Becker mentioned. “He’s carrying it for all of us on this room, in a stadium … And I assumed, he’s carrying it alone.”
From the Korean Warfare to the Dalai Lama
Becker was a part of AP’s Newsfeatures workforce, which coated the world’s main information tales from a characteristic perspective. In 1950, his editor despatched him to Korea, the place the U.S. and its allies deployed forces to repel an invasion of South Korea by North Korea’s Korean Folks’s Military.
Becker embedded with the U.S. Marines. Communications have been poor and the Marines used their restricted radio connections for battlefield directions. So Becker typed up his tales and put them within the breast pockets of wounded troops being evacuated for medical remedy. He connected notes asking nurses and docs to name the closest Related Press workplace.
“I knew they’d go no less than to Tokyo and possibly even Honolulu. In reality, one among my tales emerged in Washington. They flew the child to Bethesda,” he mentioned.
Becker mentioned all his tales made it out — although not fairly so as.
He later embedded with the third Military Division, which recaptured Seoul. He remembered crossing the Han River with seven or eight troopers and different correspondents and strolling round a metropolis deserted by opposing troops.
A gifted storyteller, Becker delighted colleagues along with his recounting of the Dalai Lama’s 1959 entry into Indian exile. Few photographs existed of the Tibetan religious chief on the time, and the AP and its then-archrival, United Press Worldwide, raced to transmit the primary footage of his arrival within the northern city of Tezpur. Each AP and UPI chartered planes to Kolkata to hurry their pictures to a “radiophoto” machine that might ship the photographs world wide.
The UPI correspondent obtained there first after AP’s pilot took a extra circuitous path to keep away from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) airspace attributable to India-Pakistan disputes. Quickly Becker started receiving a collection of more and more alarmed cables from AP editors in London informing him that UPI’s Dalai Lama photographs have been coming in and demanding to know the whereabouts of AP’s.
Becker lastly transmitted AP’s first photograph and feared he was headed for a profession change. “I can see I’m going to be on the evening desk in Des Moines,” Becker mentioned.
Then editors cabled once more: “URGENT BECKER UPI DALAI LAMA FULL HAIRED. OUR DALAI LAMA SHORN CLARIFY URGENTLY. AP PHOTOS LONDON.”
“And I noticed that God could have given me a hen pilot, however he made up for it by assigning the one correspondent in Asia who was so silly he didn’t know what the Dalai Lama appeared like and who had despatched three radiophotos of the Indian interpreter,” Becker mentioned.
‘An important story I ever wrote’
Within the Nineteen Sixties, the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin lured Becker from AP to be a columnist, clearing the way in which for what Becker referred to as “crucial story I ever wrote.”
It depicted the soccer workforce from Farrington Excessive College — which served the hardscrabble Honolulu neighborhood of Kalihi — as they triumphed over a rich non-public college rival, Kamehameha, within the 1965 league championship.
The workforce’s volunteer bus drivers all had day jobs driving metropolis rubbish vans. Their coach was a service provider seaman who missed ships throughout soccer season. Some gamers didn’t have something to eat for breakfast or lunch. When their coach came upon, he had the varsity cafeteria save unused milk and purchased gamers cereal.
Becker tagged alongside to a Waikiki resort the place the coach put the workforce the evening earlier than the large sport to get them away from playing and distractions at residence. Becker detailed the gamers carrying their dishes to the kitchen at a restaurant after they have been carried out consuming. And the way the captain led the workforce in prayer, asking for steerage and for nobody to be injured — both on their very own workforce or the opposing facet.
State Rep. Gregg Takayama, a 1970 graduate of Farrington and a former Star-Bulletin reporter, mentioned the column was a supply of delight for Kalihi. Again then — and to some extent now — information protection of Kalihi targeted on violence, medication and gangs.
“The message of the story actually was that, regardless of your beginnings, as humble as they could be, you are able to do nice issues,” Takayama mentioned. “And that’s what was proven within the story via the workforce bonding, the truth that they labored as an actual workforce in each sense of the phrase and made one thing nice out of themselves.”
For many years afterward, folks approached Becker to inform him how a lot the story meant to them or that that they had a framed copy hanging of their residence.
Becker’s spouse of 60 years, Betty Hanson Becker, died in 2008. They did not have youngsters however turned godparents to Brooks, her sister Cristina Escoda and her cousin Maria Teresa Roxas after they have been youngsters and Brooks’ and Escoda’s father was Becker’s colleague within the Manila bureau. Becker is survived by Brooks and her husband Peter Brooks, Escoda and Roxas.
Copyright 2025 The Related Press. All rights reserved. This materials is probably not printed, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed with out permission.