HONOLULU – Jim Becker, a world-traveling journalist who covered Jackie Robinson’s big-league baseball debut and the U.S. Army’s retaking of Seoul during the Korean War, died Friday. He was 98.
He died of natural causes at a Honolulu hospital, said his goddaughter Carla Escoda Brooks.
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Becker served as an Associated Press bureau chief in Manila, New Delhi and Honolulu and covered Margaret Thatcher as a freelance journalist in London. But he said his most important story was about an underdog Hawaii high school football team that won a league championship, a tale he told as a Honolulu Star-Bulletin columnist.
Becker joined the AP in 1946 fresh out of the Army when he walked into the wire service’s New York headquarters without an appointment and was hired to start the next day.
He watched Robinson become the first Black player on a Major League baseball team when editors sent him to the trailblazing athlete’s first game as a Brooklyn Dodger.
Nearly half of Robinson’s teammates had signed a petition because they didn’t want to play with a Black man. But the stadium crowd was supportive of Robinson, Becker said, adding that half of Brooklyn was Jewish “and they knew a little something about prejudice.”
Becker, who was just 20 at the time, got quotes from Robinson in the clubhouse and ran them up to the AP staffer writing the story. Becker, in an interview for this obituary, recalled seeing Robinson emerge from the first base dugout and begin to play catch with a player who unbeknownst to Robinson had signed the petition.
“And I thought, he’s carrying the banner of decency and dignity and fair play and the American promise,” Becker said. “He’s carrying it for all of us in this room, in a stadium … And I thought, he’s carrying it alone.”
From the Korean War to the Dalai Lama
Becker was part of AP’s Newsfeatures team, which covered the world's major news stories from a feature perspective. In 1950, his editor sent him to Korea, where the U.S. and its allies deployed forces to repel an invasion of South Korea by North Korea's Korean People’s Army.
Becker embedded with the U.S. Marines. Communications were poor and the Marines used their limited radio connections for battlefield instructions. So Becker typed up his stories and put them in the breast pockets of wounded troops being evacuated for medical treatment. He attached notes asking nurses and doctors to call the nearest Associated Press office.
“I knew they would go at least to Tokyo and maybe even Honolulu. In fact, one of my stories emerged in Washington. They flew the kid to Bethesda,” he said.
Becker said all his stories made it out — though not quite in order.
He later embedded with the 3rd Army Division, which recaptured Seoul. He remembered crossing the Han River with seven or eight soldiers and other correspondents and walking around a city abandoned by opposing troops.
A gifted storyteller, Becker delighted colleagues with his recounting of the Dalai Lama’s 1959 entry into Indian exile. Few photos existed of the Tibetan spiritual leader at the time, and the AP and its then-archrival, United Press International, raced to transmit the first pictures of his arrival in the northern town of Tezpur. Both AP and UPI chartered planes to Kolkata to rush their photographs to a “radiophoto” machine that would send the pictures around the world.
The UPI correspondent got there first after AP’s pilot took a more circuitous route to avoid East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) airspace due to India-Pakistan disputes. Soon Becker began receiving a series of increasingly alarmed cables from AP editors in London informing him that UPI’s Dalai Lama photos were coming in and demanding to know the whereabouts of AP’s.
Becker finally transmitted AP’s first photo and feared he was headed for a career change. “I can see I’m going to be on the night desk in Des Moines,” Becker said.
Then editors cabled again: “URGENT BECKER UPI DALAI LAMA FULL HAIRED. OUR DALAI LAMA SHORN CLARIFY URGENTLY. AP PHOTOS LONDON.”
“And I realized that God may have given me a chicken pilot, but he made up for it by assigning the only correspondent in Asia who was so stupid he didn’t know what the Dalai Lama looked like and who had sent three radiophotos of the Indian interpreter,” Becker said.
‘The most important story I ever wrote’
In the 1960s, the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin lured Becker from AP to be a columnist, clearing the way for what Becker called “the most important story I ever wrote.”
It depicted the football team from Farrington High School — which served the hardscrabble Honolulu neighborhood of Kalihi — as they triumphed over a wealthy private school rival, Kamehameha, in the 1965 league championship.
The team’s volunteer bus drivers all had day jobs driving city garbage trucks. Their trainer was a merchant seaman who missed ships during football season. Some players didn’t have anything to eat for breakfast or lunch. When their coach found out, he had the school cafeteria save unused milk and bought players cereal.
Becker tagged along to a Waikiki hotel where the coach put the team the night before the big game to get them away from gambling and distractions at home. Becker detailed the players carrying their dishes to the kitchen at a restaurant after they were done eating. And how the captain led the team in prayer, asking for guidance and for no one to be injured — either on their own team or the opposing side.
State Rep. Gregg Takayama, a 1970 graduate of Farrington and a former Star-Bulletin reporter, said the column was a source of pride for Kalihi. Back then — and to some extent now — news coverage of Kalihi focused on violence, drugs and gangs.
“The message of the story really was that, no matter your beginnings, as humble as they may be, you can do great things,” Takayama said. “And that is what was shown in the story through the team bonding, the fact that they worked as a real team in every sense of the word and made something great out of themselves.”
For decades afterward, people approached Becker to tell him how much the story meant to them or that they had a framed copy hanging in their home.
Becker's wife of 60 years, Betty Hanson Becker, died in 2008. They didn't have children but became godparents to Brooks, her sister Cristina Escoda and her cousin Maria Teresa Roxas when they were children and Brooks' and Escoda's father was Becker's colleague in the Manila bureau. Becker is survived by Brooks and her husband Peter Brooks, Escoda and Roxas.