From semantics to the U.S. Senate, S.I. Hayakawa
Appendix A
Eulogies for Ex.-Sen. Hayakawa He is remembered as a man of many accomplishments
By Diane Curtis
Chronicle Staff Writer
S. I. Hayakawa, the former U.S. senator and president of San Francisco State University, was remembered at an upbeat memorial service yesterday as a soft-spoken and fun-loving intellectual with a love of jazz, art and the English language.
At a "celebration" at the Showcase Theater near the Marin County Civic Center, about 500 friends, relatives, former students and colleagues tapped their feet to the beat of the San Francisco All-Stars, a Dixieland jazz band, listened to a gospel song sung by a San Francisco school teacher and heard reminiscences of the man they knew fondly as "Don."
The picture that has been painted of Dr. Hayakawa, a Mill Valley resident who died last Thursday of a stroke at the age of 85, is "incomplete," said his 45-year-old son, Alan, a writer and journalist.
Besides being a politician and university president who stood up against '60s student protesters, the Canadian native was a scholar, semanticist, life-long teacher, jazz aficionado, fencer, tap dancer, sushi lover, joke teller, devoted husband and father and "boogie-woogie" pianist and harmonica player, his friends and family said.
Dr. Hayakawa's 40-year-old daughter, Wynne, an artist, said she almost does not recognize the man presented as feisty in press accounts. She described him as quiet, thoughtful, genial and a good listener.
Unlike the "transient notoriety" associated with his administrative career, Dr. Hayakawa's landmark book, "Language in Thought and Action," which is still required reading in many college semantics courses, and his excellence as a teacher have secured for him a permanent place in history, said Warren Robbins, founder of the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Dr. Hayakawa, an avid collector of African art, was a founding trustee of the museum.
State Senator Frank Hill, R-Whittier, who is carrying on Hayakawa's crusade to make English the official language of the country through the organization called U.S. English, was one of several people who said they were first attracted to Dr. Hayakawa because of his semantics book, which they said had a profound influence on their lives.
Gene Prat, a colleague at San Francisco State who became Dr. Hayakawa's chief of staff during his term in the Senate from 1976 to 1982, said his boss had a genius for turning the complex and convoluted into understandable English.
Governor Ronald Reagan gave him that guarantee, "and the rest is history," Prat said. He remembered the tam-o'-shanter-wearing academic later telling him, "You know, I pulled those wires out of that speaker, and it changed my whole life." He referred to a picture that was seen around the world of the college president yanking out the wires to a loudspeaker that was broadcasting a prohibited student rally.
Dr. Hayakawa's ashes will be scattered at Point Bonita off the Marin headlands, where he used to take his sons fishing. Besides Alan and Wynne, he is survived by his wife of 55 years, Margedant, and another son, Mark, 43.
S. I. Hayakawa Dies at 85; Scholar and Former Senator
By KATHERINE BISHOP
Special to The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27 — S. I. Hayakawa, a noted scholar on language usage whose tough tactics against student protesters as a college president propelled him into a second career as a United States Senator from California, died yesterday in Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 85 years old and lived in Mill Valley, Calif., just north of San Francisco.
He died of a stroke, a spokeswoman for the hospital said.
Mr. Hayakawa helped to popularize semantics in his academic career through his widely read book, "Language in Action," which was first published in 1941. But he became better known in the tumultuous 1960's for his actions in opposition to the student protest movement as president of San Francisco State College.
On Dec. 2, 1968, a photograph of him, wearing a tam-o'-shanter as he jumped onto a platform to rip the wires out of a sound amplifying system being used by striking students, was reproduced around the nation. He immediately became the symbol of adult authority taking control of rebellious students.
Mr. Hayakawa was able to translate support for his actions from conservatives and others into a political career, serving one term in the Senate, from 1977 to 1983.
Native of Canada
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born the first of four children in Vancouver, British Columbia, on July 18, 1906. He remained in Canada when his parents returned to their native Japan in 1929.
He graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1927 and received a master's
degree from McGill University before immigrating to the United States in 1929A symbol of adult authority against rebellious youth of the 1960's.
He received his Ph.D. in 1935 from the University of Wisconson. In 1937, while teaching at the university, he married one of his students, Margedant Peters. At the time, marriages between whites and Asians were not recognized in some states, including California, and the couple lived for nearly two decades in Chicago.
In 1941, while an assistant professor of English at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Mr. Hayakawa published "Language in Action," which became a selection of the Book of the Month club and a popular high school semantics text. It was updated and published as "Language in Thought and Action" in 1949, and is still in print.
In an interview in 1976 he said the book had been written in response to the rise of Hitler and the success of his propaganda. He said he thought "people have got to understand something about how language works."
By the time Mr. Hayakawa was a college president, his writings on general semantics were widely seen in academic circles as a successful popularization of the work of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish scholar. Mr. Hayakawa had described himself as in "the deepest dept" to Dr. Korzybski.
The general theme of the Korzybski-Hayakawa theory as propounded by then was that words are not the same as reality, that at best they only lead to an understanding of real meaning and at worst actually camouflage it.
While experts in linguistics and semantics assess his contribution to the field as important for interpreting the theoretical research and scholarship of others in a readable form for the general public, Mr. Hayakawa was known to bristle at the assertion that he was not a scholar.
"It's fatal to your scholarly reputation," he said in a 1984 interview. "If you write things everyone can understand, you're a cheap popularizer."
After the outbreak of war with Japan in 1941 more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were forcibly relocated from the West Coast and held in internment camps. Mr. Hayakawa, however, remained in Chicago and was not interned.
In 1976, while a candidate for the Senate, he angered many Japanese-Americans by asserting that the internment had been beneficial because it helped younger Japanese-Americans break out of the traditional paternalistic family structure.
Barred From Citizenship
Because of wartime restrictions, however, he was barred for years from becoming a United States citizen and became a naturalized citizen only in 1954.
From 1950 through 1955, Mr. Hayakawa lectured at the University of Chicago and pursued his love of American jazz, writing a newspaper column on the topic for a Chicago newspaper, The Defender, and coming to know Duke Ellington and Mahalia Jackson.
In 1955 he was hired as a lecturer at San Francisco State College, now San Francisco State University, and moved to a home in suburban Mill Valley. Mr. Hayakawa became a professor of English at San Francisco State in 1956 and taught part time while giving speeches to private groups and writing three more books.
He came to sudden national prominence in 1968 as spokesman for a faculty committee that opposed a student strike. The strike, led by the Black Students Union and joined by the American Federation of Teachers, was touched off by the suspension of a black instructor and demands for a black studies program and increased enrollment of minority students.
Mr. Hayakawa, after being appointed acting president of the college, banned student demonstrations and speeches, an act that led to the mass arrest of more than 400 people. Mr. Hayakawa was made president of the college the following year, a position he held until 1973.
Admiration From Foes
Nearly two decades after the turbulent events of 1968, Eric Solomon, a professor of English who was a leader of faculty members supporting the student strike, described Mr. Hayakawa as "a man for the appropriate season."
"We opposed him but admired him — against our will really — for the skill with which he established himself," Mr. Solomon said.
The convictions of those arrested were later overturned by the California Supreme Court as an abrogation of First Amendment rights.
The day after he retired as president of the college in August 1973, he switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Declaring that the Democratic Party was responsible for the youth rebellion of the 1960's, he ran for the Senate in 1976 at the age of 70. He won a close races against the Democratic incumbent, John Tunney.
'Republican Unpredictable'
Eschewing labels, he referred to himself as a "Republican unpredictable" but quickly became identified as one of the most conservative members of the party. While in the Senate he opposed busing to achieve racial integration of schools, introduced a proposed constitutional amendment to make English the nation's official language, supported a reduction in the minimum wage for younger workers and unsuccessfully worked to withhold public financing from universities with affirmative action programs.
He was also satirized for frequently sleeping during Senate proceeding, earning him the nickname "Sleepin' Sam." He admitted that he sometimes drifted off but only when the speaker was taking 20 minutes to say something that could be said in two.
By the end of his term his wealthy conservative backers in Southern California deserted him. He began to campaign for a second term in 1982 but quickly dropped out.
Declaring that bilingual ballots were "profoundly racist" and that "the most rapid way of getting out of the ghetto is to speak good English," he served as honorary chairman of the California English Campaign, which promoted a successful ballot initiative in 1986 making English the official language of the state.
His other books included "Through the Communication Barrier" (1979).
Mr. Hayakawa is survived by his wife of 52 years, the former Margedant Peters; two sons, Alan, of Harrisburg, Pa., and Mark, of Mill Valley, and a daughter, Wynne Hayakawa of San Francisco.
Obituaries: Outspoken U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa Dies at 85
By J.Y. Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
S.I. Hayakawa, 85, a noted semanticist whose willingness to confront striking student radicals at San Francisco State University in the late 1960s led to a career in politics and a seat in the U.S. Senate, died of a stroke Feb. 27 at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, Calif. He had been hospitalized for bronchitis.
A witty, independent and iconoclastic figure whose interests ran the gamut from jazz and African and Asian art to fencing and cooking, Dr. Hayakawa was the author of a classic work on the way people react to words and symbols. As a public servant, he was a hero to some and a villain to others, and he readily acknowledged that he hurt himself by his tendency to speak without thinking.
But it was action, not words, that first gained him prominence outside of academia. He had been interim president of San Francisco State for less than a week when he climbed onto a sound truck on the campus on Dec. 2, 1968, and ripped the wires from the loudspeaker during a student protest. The event was captured on live television, and the slender, soft-spoken scholar with a fondness for multihued tam-o'-shanters became one of the most popular figures in California. He was dubbed "Samurai Sam."
During the next several months, he broke student and faculty strikes and restored normal classes. An African studies program was added to the curriculum, a key demand of the protesters. But demands that African studies be entirely independent were refused, and the department was put under the same administrative network as other academic programs.
In 1973, Dr. Hayakawa resigned as president of San Francisco State—he had been given the job on a permanent basis by Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California at the time—and three years later he ran for U.S. Senate. A former Democrat, he joined the Republican Party and described himself as a "Republican unpredictable."
He was an instant success on the hustings. Although he later supported the treaties giving Panama ultimate control of the Panama Canal, he delighted conservatives during the campaign when he said that the United States should keep it, because "we stole it fair and square." On another occasion, when asked for his views on a referendum on dog racing, he replied that he didn't "give a good goddamn about greyhounds one way or another." In the election, he handily beat Democratic incumbent John V. Tunney.
In the Senate, his outspokeness and seeming indifference to appearances became a liability. He had long had a habit of dozing off in meetings that bored him, but when he did it during orientation sessions for new senators and later at such occasions as White House legislative meetings he drew wide criticism. He was known as "Sleeping Sam."
There were other troubles. Dr. Hayakawa had not even been sworn in when he was ridiculed for objecting to his assignment to the Senate Budget Committee on the ground that "I don't understand money at all [and] have the greatest difficulty even balancing my own checkbook."
He alienated many constituents when he said that rising oil prices were not a concern, because "the poor don't need gas, because they're not working." He angered many others when he defended the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as "perhaps the best thing that could have happened," because it helped integrate them with the rest of society later. He was a Canadian citizen teaching in Chicago during the war, and was not involved with the internment program.
In later years, Dr. Hayakawa sponsored a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the United States, claiming that a command of English was "the fastest way out of the ghetto." He opposed bilingual education in public schools and bilingual ballots as "foolish and unnecessary."
Finding himself with little support by the end of his first term, Dr. Hayakawa retired.
"He was invaluable during some very difficult times—a courageous man of integrity and principle," former President Reagan said in a statement.
Gov. Pete Wilson described Dr. Hayakawa as "a great California iconoclast," and said "certain images from S.I. Hayakawa's remarkable life will be burned into our memories forever."
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born July 18, 1906, in Vancouver, British Columbia, of Japanese parents. His father, Ichiro Hayakawa had served in the U.S. [Navyasa] steward and then returned to Japan to marry Tora Isono. They settled in Canada, where the elder Hayakawa established an import-export business.
"Sam" Hayakawa, the eldest of four children, graduated from the University of Manitoba and received a master's degree in English from McGill University. He received a doctorate in semantics from the University of Wisconsin. He taught there until 1939, when he moved to Chicago and taught at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology. From 1950 to 1955, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago. He then joined the
Dr. Hayakawa made his scholarly reputation with "Language in Action," which appeared in 1941. It was reissued in 1947 as "Language and Thought in Action," a basic text in the field of semantics, which Dr. Hayakawa defined as the "comparative study of the kinds of responses people make to the symbols and signs around them."
The book was prompted by the rise of Hitler and the way he used words and symbols to consolidate his political power. It makes the argument that words can be used both to disguise and distort reality and to illuminate it, and that words therefore are different from reality.
Dr. Hayakawa's late brother-in-law, the late architect William Wesley Peters, was married to Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, who gave birth to the former Soviet leader's granddaughter in the Hayakawa residence in Mill Valley, Calif.
Dr. Hayakawa's survivors include his wife, the former Margedant Peters, whom he met while he was teaching at Wisconsin, of Mill Valley; two sons; and a daughter.
Former professor evolved from semanticist to senator
By Bill Snyder
Tribune staff writer
Former U.S. Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, an owlish professor of semantics whose dramatic climb onto a sound truck at San Francisco State College made him a conservative folk hero, died of a stroke yesterday at the age of 85.
The jazz-loving, Canadian-born scholar, whose trademark was a jaunty tam-o-shanter, parlayed his hard-line stance against student radicals into national fame and a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Hayakawa's political life was preceded by a highly successful academic career as a pioneer in the field of semantics, publishing five widely read books.
But his propensity for napping during debates and making controversial, off-the-cuff remarks made him an object of derision, and his political career ended after a single term in the Senate.
Hayakawa's death at 1 a.m. in Marin General Hospital drew affectionate tributes from former President Ronald Reagan and Gov. Pete Wilson, but some Japanese Americans who resented his refusal to recognize the injustice of wartime internments were less sorry to see him go.
"He was invaluable during some very difficult times — a courageous man of integrity and principle," Reagan said. "Nancy and I are saddened by the death of our dear friend. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family during this difficult time."
Wilson described Hayakawa as "a great California iconoclast."
"I was saddened to learn of the passing of my predecessor in the U.S. Senate. Certain images from S.I. Hayakawa's remarkable life will be burned into our memories forever," Wilson said.
Foremost among those moments was Dec. 2, 1968, Hayakawa's first day on the job as president of San Francisco State College. The college was then in the midst of a massive and sometimes violent strike aimed at establishing the nation's first major black and ethnic studies departments.
A furious Hayakawa clambered onto the back of a sound truck parked in front of the campus in defiance of his orders, and ripped out the speaker wires, silencing the strikers.
"I was stunned, flabbergasted," recalled Ernie Brill, who was inside the truck that day. "He was so mad you could see the foam on his mouth."
Hayakawa's bold move was captured by newspaper and television cameras from around the world, transforming a bookish man who was hardly known outside the academic world into a telegenic symbol of law and order.
Even his opponents believed the attack on the sound truck was a stroke of genuis. "It's the kind of thing we wished we had done," said John Levin, a leader of the student strike and now a San Francisco-based screenwriter.
Thrived on conflict
The 5-foot 6-inch college president seemed to relish every confrontation with the radicals. After nine students were injured in a clash with police, Hayakawa said, "It's the most exciting thing since my 10th birthday when I rode a roller coaster for the first time."
The press dubbed him "Samurai Sam," a nickname he loved.
A lifelong Democrat, Hayakawa changed his registration to Republican and tried to run for the U.S. Senate in 1974. But a court barred him from entering the primary because he hadn't been a Republican for the required 12 months.
Two years later, Hayakawa easily defeated nine opponents in the primary and then bested incumbent Democrat John Tunney in the general election.
Tunney, son of former heavy-weight boxing champion Gene Tunney, said, "To use the metaphor of my father's profession, I found he was very difficult to lay a glove on."
The seat in the Senate was the culmination of a long journey for a man born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on July 18, 1906.
Although his parents were born in Japan, Sam Ichiye Hayakawa spoke no Japanese, and he angered fellow Japanese Americans by defending their internment during World War II.
He said the relocation of 120,000 of them from the West Coast to inland camps was "perhaps the best thing that could have happened" because it integrated them afterward into the mainstream of U.S. society.
Hayakawa escaped internment because he was a citizen of Canada during World War II and was then teaching in the Midwest.
Cressey Nakagawa, national president of the Japanese American Citizens League, said those remarks left a legacy of anger in the community. "You can't say he was well-liked." Had Hayakawa been a white man, Nakagawa said, "people would have called him racist."
Students got last laugh
Also unforgiving are the student radicals he tried to crush.
Brill, now a writer living in Vermont, feels that the strikers ultimately had the last laugh. "When we struck, multiculturalism wasn't even a word. Now, it's part of the national agenda," he said.
Eric Solomon, a longtime member of the English department at the college, jousted with Haykawa during the '60s. Yesterday he said of his former opponent: "He was the true embodiment of the phrase carpe diem — he seized the day at every moment."
Hayakawa graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1927, earned a master's degree at McGill University in Montreal in 1928 and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1935.
While teaching at Wisconsin, Hayakawa wrote a freshman English text to alert his students
Entitled "Language in Action" (now in revised editions as "Language in Thought and Action"), the book was published in 1941, became a Book-of-the-Month selection and a national best-seller and started Hayakawa on the road to affluence.
The book introduced the word "semantics" into general usage and established Hayakawa's reputation as a semanticist. Hayakawa later taught at the University of Chicago and then joined the faculty of San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1955.
Became spokesman
He became an unofficial spokesman for conservative faculty members, decrying the growing influence of radical faculty members on the campus.
Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan made him acting president late in 1968, saying, "If he takes the job, we'll forgive him Pearl Harbor."
Hayakawa brought hundreds of police from all around the Bay Area to reopen the campus and was on his way to the Senate.
But by the time he was elected in 1976, Hayakawa was 70, and his age was showing.
Shortly before taking office it was reported that he slept through Senate orientation sessions, and "Samurai Sam" became "Sleepy Sam."
By the end of his term, polls showed him trailing then-Gov. Jerry Brown, the eventual Democratic nominee, by a 2-1 margin, and Hayakawa pulled out of the 1982 race.
After leaving the Senate, Hayakawa, who lived in Mill Valley, took up the cause of "English first," campaigning for a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the United States. He opposed bilingual education and bilingual ballots.
In recent years, Hayakawa stayed out of the public eye. He was admitted to Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae on Tuesday, suffering from bronchitis. However, the cause of death was a stroke, said hospital spokes-woman Sandra Boeschen.
Hayakawa is survived by his wife, Margedant, two sons and a daughter. Plans for a memorial service are pending.
Ex-Senator Hayakawa Dies at 85 He gained fame in '60s as fiery president of S.F. State
By Louis Freedberg
Chronicle Staff Writer
Former Senator S.I. Hayakawa, the diminutive tam-o'-shanter-wearing semantics professor whose crackdown on student protesters at San Francisco State University in 1968 vaulted him to international prominence, died yesterday. He was 85.
The soft-spoken Hayakawa, who had lived with his wife, Margedant, in Mill Valley for 32 years, died at 1 a.m. yesterday morning at Marin General Hospital after being hospitalized for bronchitis.
The Canadian-born linguist was 70 when he was elected to the Senate in 1976 after a stormy tenure as president of San Francisco State during the tumultuous years of campus unrest over the Vietnam War and the emergence of the black power movement among college students.
Wearing his jaunty, multihued tam-o-shanter as his trademark, the feisty Hayakawa brought as much color and controversy to Capitol Hill as he had during his years as president of the strifetorn San Francisco campus a decade before.
"He was invaluable during some very difficult times," said former President Ronald Reagan, describing Hayakawa as "a courageous man of integrity and principle."
Reagan, also a fierce opponent of student radicals, was governor at the time Hayakawa confronted the San Francisco State protesters with tough words shouted through a bullhorn as he stood defiantly on the back of a truck.
Governor Wilson, who took over from the conservative Republican Hayakawa in the Senate in 1982, described Hayakawa as "a great California iconoclast."
"I was saddened to learn of the passing of my predecessor in the U.S. Senate," the governor said in a statement. "Certain images from S.I. Hayakawa's remarkable life will be burned into our memories forever."
Senator Alan Cranston, Hayakawa's colleague and frequent adversary, said yesterday, "`Sam and I agreed on practically nothing. Still, I respected him as a feisty but sincere battler for his beliefs."
Hayakawa was once one of the most popular figures to Californians fed up with student militants and Vietnam War demonstrators. But he saw his fortunes wane almost as soon as he was elected to the Senate in 1976 after a solid victory over Senator John V. Tunney, the Democratic incumbent who was seeking a second term.
He set the tone of his first term as a senator early by walking out on his own inaugural ceremonies. "My feet are cold," he said. The newly elected senator also bruised protocol again by passing up a black-tie dinner for freshmen senators because he was "bushed."
"When I first went to Washington," Senator Hayakawa told a friend on his first return trip, "I thought, `What is li'l ol' me doing with these 99 great people?' Now I ask myself, `What am I doing with these 99 jerks?' "
With a rapier tongue, the senator brushed off attacks on his advanced years, memory lapses and naps in the middle of legislative hearings. "It's how old you are between the ears that counts, particularly when you consider the number of people with frozen minds in their 30s," he once said.
His critics quickly dubbed him "Sleepy Sam" for his frequent catnaps during senatorial business.
Controversial Remarks
During his six years in Washington, Hayakawa also often made what he later conceded were ill-advised remarks. Although of Japanese ancestry, Hayakawa said it was "perfectly understandable" that Japanese Americans were sent to relocation camps for their own safety during World War II.
He endeared himself to conservatives by saying during his 1976 campaign that the United States should never surrender the Panama Canal because "we stole it fair and square." Yet two years later, he voted to return the canal to Panamanian control.
Congressional Quarterly ranked him 93rd among the Senate's 100 members in voting attendance, and Washingtonian Magazine rated him as the Senate's least effective member.
By the end of his term in 1982, polls showed him trailing then-Governor Jerry Brown, the eventual Democratic nominee for the Senate, by a 2-to-1 ratio. Hayakawa pulled out of the race when it became clear that he would never win. Wilson went on to beat Brown.
Hayakawa later complained that the media, especially the repeated jokes by Johnny Carson about his napping, had damaged his image.
"I blurt things out which newspapers take advantage of to caricature me," Hayakawa said. "But damn it, I'm the kind of guy that blurts things out as they come to me. And that's been very damaging. The people who get their basic political information from Johnny Carson remember nothing else about my career."
After leaving the Senate, Hayakawa was an adviser on Asian affairs to Secretary of State George Shultz and helped lead the successful 1986 California initiative campaign to declare English the state's official language.
Campus Years
Although a renowned linguist, Hayakawa achieved worldwide recognition in 1968 when he was appointed acting president of San Francisco State in the middle of a student strike led by the Black Students Union. The strike had resulted in several violent clashes between students and police and hundreds of arrests.
His first action as president was to shut down the campus for a Thanksgiving holiday cooling-off period while he decided on a course of action to restore order.
He reopened the campus Dec. 2, 1968, under a "state of emergency" with a number of strict rules including an order that teachers and students failing to report for classes would be suspended. He also promised a strong show of police on campus to enforce these and other orders.
But student strike leaders defied him and went ahead with a rally near the administration building, prompting the new president to stage a mini-protest of his own that stunned dissidents and eventually brought him worldwide recognition.
Hayakawa climbed atop the protesters' sound truck during the rally and yanked out the wires to the loudspeakers, bringing the rally to an abrupt halt and ultimately thwarting the student strike. The incident was broadcast live on local television.
Hayakawa said he was determined "to break up this reign of terror" on the campus.
A few days after the sound truck incident, however, he announced the creation of the first black studies department at San Francisco State, as demanded by students, and made other concessions. The department still exists today.
'15 Minutes of Glory'
"He had 15 minutes of glory, he put S.F. State on the map, and he
was able to use that fame to get himself elected to the Senate," said San Francisco State English Professor Eric Solomon, who was one of Hayakawa's main critics on campus. "I can't think of a leadership contribution that he made as far as the institution is concerned."His critics dubbed him `Sleepy Sam' for his frequent catnaps during senatorial business
But Hayakawa saw his actions as part of an almost religious mission to preserve the independence of the university. "I think that in another time, I would have been a priest," he once said in an interview. "Colleges today are very much what the medieval church was — all of that to which the hopes of human salvation are entrusted."
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1906. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Manitoba in 1927 and took his master's degree in English a year later from McGill University in Montreal.
While studying for his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, Hayakawa met Margedant Peters, a student at the university. They were married in 1937.
It was at Wisconsin that his colleagues, in mockery of his Canadian-English accent, kiddingly accused him of sounding like an Oxford don. They tagged him with the nickname "Don," which stuck.
Study of Semantics
Hayakawa once described semantics as "the study of what it is that goes haywire when people misunderstand each other — or themselves — and what to do about it."
His first book on the subject, "Language in Thought and Action," was basically a response to the dangers of propaganda, especially as it was used by Adolf Hitler in persuading millions to share his views.
Published in 1941, the book became a Book of the Month Club selection and quickly established him as one of the nation's specialists in semantics and linguistics.
He authored at least six other such books and contributed to the writing or editing of numerous dictionaries and other reference works on English usage.
In 1955, Hayakawa joined the faculty of what was then called San Francisco State College. A sports enthusiast as well as an educator, he was an accomplished fencer and for many years was in the starting lineup for the annual Reno's-VIP charity softball game in San Francisco.
In addition to his wife and mother, he is survived by two sons, Alan of Harrisburg, Pa., and Mark of Mill Valley, and a daughter, Wynne Hayakawa of Mill Valley.
Memorial services are pending.
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb5q2nb40v&brand=oac4
Title: From semantics to the U.S. Senate, : oral history transcript / S.I. Hayakawa
By: Hayakawa, S. I. (Samuel Ichiye), Interviewee, Shearer, Julie Gordon, Interviewer
Date: 1994
Contributing Institution: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/
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