At the Helm at the Associated Press
Charles Gary
Special to The Hawai‘i Herald
Reprinted from March 18, 1994
Editor’s note: In his long career in journalism, Gordon Sakamoto rarely got the kind of byline exposure that most print, broadcast — and now web — journalists get for their work. That is the nature of the newswire business, and Sakamoto was one of Hawai‘i’s most experienced in the medium. Sakamoto died Nov. 8 in Honolulu at the age of 82.
I “met” Gordon Sakamoto in the late 1970s when I worked for about a year at what was then KHVH Newsradio 99. I had the gawdawful midnight to 6 a.m. on-air shift and was the only person in the entire station, which was located in the former Gas Company building on Bishop Street. I had to deliver two newscasts each hour — each about five minutes long. As if that shift weren’t bad enough, trying to scrape together enough news to read over the airwaves after a slow news weekend, as most were, to fill the overnight newscasts was the absolute pits. Most of the “news” was old copy, some of it even from the past Friday.
