NEW FACES IN CONGRESS

In choosing their first two U.S. Senators and single Congressman, Hawaiians last week elected a slate as ethnically varied (one Chinese-American, one Japanese-American, one mainland-born Caucasian) and politically divided (two Democrats, one Republican) as the new state itself:

Hiram Leong Fong, 52, U.S. Senator, who will be the first person of Asian descent to sit in the upper house of Congress. A handsome, greying man, he is an independent Republican and a self-made millionaire whose immigrant father came from Kwangtung province to work in the Oahu cane fields for $12 a month. The seventh of eleven children, Fong decided as a small boy to lift himself out of poverty, worked his way through high school by selling newspapers, shining shoes and caddying, changed his first name from Yau to Hiram to honor a venerable Congregational missionary, Hiram Bingham.* The University of Hawaii was tougher, but Hiram Fong got through in three years with honors, with a bewildering collection of side jobs that ranged from bill collector to tourist guide. After graduation he worked for two years, borrowed $3,000 to go to Harvard Law School, went back to Hawaii in 1935 with his degree and "10-c- in my pocket." The law firm he founded is wonderfully Hawaiian--Fong, Miho, Choy & Robinson --Chinese, Japanese. Korean and Caucasian, in that order. He plunged energetically into politics, and after the war into business, is now the president of six prospering companies (real estate, insurance, shopping centers, loans and investments, and a banana plantation), has spent 14 years in the territorial legislature, six of them as stentorian-voiced speaker of the house.

Oren Ethelbert Long, 70, U.S. Senator. A Kansas-born farm boy, Oren Long progressed from a one-room schoolhouse in Earlton to Tennessee's Johnson Bible College (Disciples of Christ) and the University of Michigan. He sailed to Hilo on Big Island in 1917 to become a social worker. Five years later he returned to the mainland to earn his second master's degree, in education at Columbia's Teachers College, then hurried back to the territory. For the next 22 years Long served ably in Hawaii's educational system, rose from high school principal to superintendent of the territorial public-school system, delivered scores of amiable, rambling commencement speeches, signed thousands of diplomas. (Politicos estimate that he drew 50,000 of his 83,704 votes last week from former students and their families.) In 1946 Democrat Long was appointed territorial public-welfare director, and he was Acting Governor during the turbulent pineapple workers' strike of 1947 and the longshoremen's strike of 1949. President Truman appointed him tenth territorial Governor in 1951, and he held office unobtrusively until displaced by a Republican (Samuel Wilder King in 1953). Long has held office as territorial Senator since 1956. He felt so confident of his election to the Senate that he took a one-week sabbatical after the primary to attend an international Lions convention in New York.

Daniel Ken Inouye (pronounced "ee no way"), 34, Representative in Congress, Nisei, a war hero and leader of Hawaii's young Democrats. The son of a naturalized Japanese clerk, husky, well-poised Danny Inouye will be the first U.S. Congressman of Japanese descent.-At 18, he enlisted in the celebrated Nisei 442nd ("Go for Broke") Regimental Combat Team, won a battlefield commission, a Distinguished Service Cross, and 14 other decorations for heroism in action. In the Po Valley campaign of April 1945, 2nd Lieut. Inouye led his platoon in the destruction of a German mortar observation post. During the action Inouye was shot in the stomach while wiping out a machine-gun nest; then his right arm was shattered by a grenade. Despite his injuries, he refused evacuation and directed the final assault that carried the ridge. Inouye went home to attend the University of Hawaii, got his law degree from George Washington University, hung out his shingle and surfboarded into politics. A veteran of both houses of the Hawaiian legislature. he is approaching his new job with characteristic modesty. "Seriously," he says, "I'm a little scared."

*The missionary's grandson, also named Hiram Bingham, was a noted explorer who served (1924-33) as Republican Senator from Connecticut, once smuggled a manufacturer's lobbyist into a closed hearing, was publicly censured by the Senate.

*But not the first Asian. California's Democratic Representative Dalip Singh Saund, who was born in Punjab, India and who defeated famed Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran Odium in a lively 1956 election, holds that distinction. /

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.