Capsun's Corner – by Capsun M. Poe

To Capsun, Happy Birthday & mahalo for serving on the Board of Regents. Aloha, Ben Cayetano

I would never call Gov. Cayetano just “Ben” – but I liked this title for this post as an obscure reference to a cartoon that I really loved when I was a little kid, Ben and Me.  You see what a nerd I am?

As you know, I spent a couple hours of my birthday attending Gov. Cayetano’s book signing.  If you must know, I bought the $50 hard cover, as a birthday present to myself.  I’ve been swamped with work commitments this week, so I haven’t actually started to read Ben: A Memoir, From Street Kid to Governor.

I’ll get started on that soon enough, but I wanted to share some thoughts from the book signing at Barnes & Noble at Kahala Mall.  Before signing books, Gov. Cayetano answered a few questions from the public.  Here’s some of what he shared:

• First, he was pleasantly surprised we were all there; he was afraid no one would attend.  I’d estimate a crowd of at least 100 people attended.  When I arrived, 30 minutes prior to the event, all the seats were already taken.
• Gov read a lot of other memoirs to get a feel for what else is out there.  He knew he definitely didn’t want to approach the 900 pages of My Life, as President Clinton did.
• He thanked Duane Kurisu, with whom I served on the Board of Regents, for publishing the book.   All proceeds go to Gov’s scholarship fund.
• This one’s for you, Quilly: The last time he was at his alma mater, Farrington High School, was in 2004.  He taught a class there for one semester.  He thought the school had changed dramatically, from the ethnic make-up of the student body to the socio-economics of Kalihi.  One thing that hadn’t changed was the teachers – many of whom were there for decades.
• Gov thought of one story that he left out of the book:  Why and how he had the Attorney General intervene to save the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
• He admitted that he didn’t keep a diary while he was Governor. That was part of the reason it took him three years to write the memoir.  But The Advertiser opened their archives to assist him.  He said fiction would be so much easier to write, and he might try his hand at that.
• Finally, he noted that his cabinet didn’t receive any raises in his entire eight years as Governor. This was a reaction to the current debate/issue of legislative pay raises.  He even bragged that almost all of them took pay cuts to work in his administration, which they did as public service.

The book signing was attended by a who’s who in local politics and government:

• My old boss, Congressman Neil Abercrombie, who wrote the foreword to the book.
• State Sen. Clayton Hee
• Judge Sam King, co-author of the Broken Trust articles that led to the eventual ouster of Kamehameha Schools trustees
• Charlie Toguchi, former State Sen. and former Superintendent of Education
• Sam Callejo, former State Comptroller and former UH Vice President
• Former State Rep. Jun Abinsay
• Dr. Ed Cadman, former Dean of the John A. Burns School of Medicine and the visionary behind the new Kakaako campus
• Rep. Gil Keith-Agaran, who served as Gov’s Board of Land and Natural Resources Chair
• Former State Sen. Randy Iwase, who ran against Gov. Lingle in 2006

And then there were a few others:

• My fiancee and my cousin, who dutifully accompanied me, I think only because it was my birthday
• Dan Seto, of the Judiciary, a fellow blogger and fellow PUBA alum who wore his ‘98 Ben election shirt

Mahalo!

Tags: abercrombie, agaran, bill clinton, broken trust, callejo, cayetano, clayton hee, dan seto, ed cadman, farrington, gov, iwase, keith-agaran, lingle, my life, puba, sam callejo, sam king, seto