The 59th Mission

Before the war, when Ben Kuroki helped his father raise sugar beets and seed potatoes on a farm in Hershey, Neb. (pop. 487), nobody paid much attention to the color of Ben's skin. The day after Pearl Harbor, Kuroki enlisted. On the train to camp, he heard for the first time what became an agonizingly familiar question: "What's that Jap doing in the Army?" To answer it, Japanese-American Ben Kuroki volunteered as an Air Force gunner.

After flying 30 missions in a B-24 over Europe and Africa and winning a pair of D.F.C.s, Sergeant Kuroki came home--where he could have stayed, had he liked. Instead, he volunteered as a gunner on a B-29 in the Pacific theater, had to pull a few strings to get the job because he was a Nisei. In a bomber christened Honorable Sad Saki, Kuroki flew 28 missions more, including strikes on Tokyo and Yokohama ("my mother's home town"); he was the first Nisei to win a D.F.C. in the Pacific. Back home again, Kuroki assigned himself a "59th mission": a quiet, sense-making fight against race prejudice in the U.S. Ben decided that the best way to carry on his fight was to set up in business as the editor of a country weekly in his native Nebraska. He enrolled in the University of Nebraska's School of Journalism under the G.I. bill. This week Kuroki's class will graduate, but Ben will get his degree by mail. He left school about three weeks ago; with borrowed money, he had bought the York (Neb.) Republican (circ. 2,000) from venerable (73) Publisher Joseph Alden, a descendant of John & Priscilla.

To get ex-Airman Kuroki off to a flying start, 42 Nebraska weekly editors, publishers and staffers, including several ex-G.I.s, came from miles around, pitched in to help Ben make his first edition a memorable one (the volunteer staff called it the "Welcome Ben Kuroki" edition).They did a good deal more. For the first edition, which rolls off the presses this week, they put together 40 pages instead of the usual eight, and drummed up an overflow supply of 3,300 inches of advertising. Said grateful Editor Kuroki: "This couldn't happen in any other country."

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