Finalist - Leonard S. Joy, Age 54

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest.

On a beautiful spring day in 1970, a young Asian-American girl with silky long black hair sends a Frisbee whirling across the university quad…

*****

"Where your Treasure is There Will your Heart Be Also"

The passport photo issued by the Imperial Japanese Government shows a handsome young man, with a neatly trimmed mustache. Shinsaku Sawada, age 30, came to America on September 19, 1918. He settled in Seattle with his young wife Kaku and their three children.

He worked hard to prosper in his new country. In 1928 he lost his wife to tuberculosis. His eldest son George, writing to his father in April, 1943:

"…Then that awful night when she died, you came home and told us gently as only you know how that she had gone away, that we mustn't cry because mother wouldn't want us to…You aged overnight. You would smile at us, but it was not from the heart. How sad you looked when you thought we were safely tucked in bed, and your pretenses dropped like a heavy load. Once I saw you weep, and I didn't know what to do."

Shinsaku lived for his children. He built his tailoring business and saved for their college education. The Depression took all that away. Again from his son's letter:

"Then came the depression and overnight we were poor. Your business and even the college fund you had saved for me were lost in the debacle. I wanted to leave school and go to work, but you were vehemently against it. How well I remember that evening when finding you so haggard and careworn, I hopefully suggested this possibility.

"You slowly straightened your tired shoulders, and some of the haggardness slipped from your face as a smile of determination broke its blackness.

"No", you said with quiet doggedness. "You shall continue your education." ….

Seven more years passed, and I was graduated from college. You were proud of me then… I gave you the diploma….and there were tears in your eyes."

George had graduated from the University of Washington and his younger brother Fred was a private in the U.S. Army, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

"In the spring of the following year we were forced to evacuate to the relocation centers. It was a bitter blow to me. I, a citizen, with a brother already serving in the army, must evacuate…I had an unbounding faith in the justice of this nation, but she in return placed me behind barbed wire like any enemy alien. I was stricken with bitterness….

…Then you comforted me and slowly withdrew the sting of bitterness… I could not understand at the time why you should attempt to restore my faith in the government which had never given you the right of citizenship and now by evacuation had made you again almost penniless. But I did not realize the love you bore for this country, made more dear because here it was that mother had died and had been laid to rest: "Where your treasure is there will your heart be also."

Wisely you said, "This is your sacrifice, accept it as such, and you will no longer be bitter."

Your son,

George

April 30, 1943

On the 5th of July, 1943 Sergeant George Katsuya Sawada was killed by a sniper while serving as a Medic in the 442 Regiment in Italy.

"The Night was Dark and Very Quiet"

Fred Sawada idolized his older brother George. George was the student, hardworking, considerate. Fred was hardheaded, impetuous and fearless. Wounded on five separate occasions, the following is from his citation for the Silver Star:

For gallantry in action on 2 August 1944, in the vicinity of ****, Private First Class Sawada volunteered to act as lead scout for a four-man patrol assigned the mission of reconnoitering the Southern *** River bank.

The night was dark and very quiet. While moving through a sparse vineyard he suddenly motioned his comrades to stop. He then advanced ten yards with his patrol leader. At this point they heard an enemy patrol advancing toward them. He held his fire until his patrol was observed by the enemy. Then, as the enemy patrol prepared to take up positions, he opened fire.

In the resulting skirmish, the entire enemy patrol of seven men was either killed or wounded. Soon, six or seven machine guns, attracted by the fire fight swept the field with grazing fire. When the patrol was ordered to withdraw, Private First Class Sawada remained behind to cover their movement with his fire. He silenced one automatic weapon on his right flank, then engaged another….

Fred made it home. He married Susanne Matsumura, whom he had met in High School. Susanne was a gifted self-taught artist who was able to leave the Minidoka camp in 1944 when she secured a job working as a retouch artist in a portrait studio in Chicago. After the war, they settled in Schenectady, New York where Fred worked for GE for thirty-four years as an engineer. He was granted over a dozen patents for his work in physics. Susanne and Fred raised two children, Suzanne, who became a corporate attorney, and Stephen, who became a noted cardiologist.

Rolling the Dice for a Better Life

Stephen Walter Joy and Lillian Mackey were married in 1910. They lived with Stephen's mother on a small rocky farm in upstate New York. By the time their third child, Kenneth, was born, they knew that rocky little farm would condemn them. They wanted more for their children. They bought a bigger farm - on contract. One hundred fifty acres - better land and fewer rocks. It was their chance to break out, but if they missed a payment the owner would take back the farm.

Ken's first memory is a smoke-filled room on a chilly October night. Neighbors rushing from their homes summoned by four long rings on the party line. Sister to brother, husband to wife, they passed pails from pump to porch, fighting through smoky tears to save a future for the young family. Big Clifford Hunt jumped down from the burning roof, pumped his heart out when it looked to all like the farm was lost. They saved the farm and the world Ken came to know was much different than it might have been.

Unlike his father, Ken got to finish high school. He had not planned to attend college and there was no way his family could have afforded the tuition. But Ken had a teacher named Leonard Palmer who took Ken to Cornell for a visit and encouraged him to apply to the state-sponsored agricultural college. Palmer told Ken that with a part-time job, he could make it at Cornell.

Ken was admitted to the college in 1935. He paid for his tuition by washing dishes and waiting tables in the dining halls and he got free lodging by becoming the chauffeur for the wife of the president of the college. He was the first member of his family to ever attend college. He not only got an education, but more important, he met a young teaching student, named Jean Burr, and fell in love.

So Many Men Didn't Return

Ken enlisted in the Army Air Corps in December 1941. He became a pilot and his mission was to fly new planes into the combat theatres and bring home the wounded. In August 1944 he took off from the island of Kawajalien heading for Hamilton Field in California. There were forty-four wounded servicemen on board his C-54 transport plane, all headed home.

Joy was training a new co-pilot and when they reached an altitude of one thousand feet, he pulled the flaps to see how the co-pilot would react to the sudden sinking motion that occurs when the flaps are engaged. But Instead of sinking, the plane rolled sharply to the right. Joy and his co-pilot grabbed the controls and tried to right the plane, but the bulky C-54 continued its sickening roll, spiraling towards the ocean.

From out of nowhere, the flight engineer, Harry Hilinski, raced to the flight deck and reached for a hydraulic valve under the throttle guardant. When he opened the valve the right flap came up, the plane leveled off and Joy and his crew and the forty-four soldiers were saved.

He returned home, married Jean Burr, and worked for thirty-six years for a farm cooperative in upstate New York. When he retired in 1980 he was the Vice President of Human Resources. Ken and Jean raised four children.

One of them was me.

*****

On a beautiful spring day in 1970, a young Asian-American girl with silky long black hair sends a Frisbee whirling across the university quad, and as she lets it fly, Suzanne Sawada yells to me, "Len! Catch it," which I do, amazed that she knows my name. Three years later we are married. Last month we took our three children out to dinner to celebrate our thirty-second anniversary.

******

Shinsaku Sawada, a sophisticated, educated man, traveled halfway around the world to build a home for his family in Seattle. Stephen Walter Joy had an eighth grade education and never traveled more than fifty miles from his farm in upstate New York. They both had the same dream - a better life for their children.

Our grandparents and parents lived their lives in the 20th Century. They overcame war, prejudice, hard-times, bad luck, tragedy. They were heroic and they were lucky. With the help of friends, neighbors, teachers, comrades, they survived and prospered.

So what does this family history have to do with being optimistic about the future?

We are here today by the grace of God. If Shinsaku had given up after his wife's death, if Clifford Hunt had been too tired to man the pump, if Leonard Palmer hadn't had the time, if Harry Helinski had been a step slower, if Jean Burr and Sue Sawada hadn't waited for their boyfriends to return home, if Suzanne had not thrown that Frisbee, I would not be here today. The decisions we make, the actions we take, the things we chose to do or not to do, they can all have a profound influence on the future.

I am optimistic because I have learned that what endures will not be our possessions, or our careers or even our reputation, because in time those will all fade away, but how we live our life, the good things we do - the acts of kindness and the sacrifices, large and small, for our family, for our friends and for complete strangers, those things will live on in ways that we can never imagine. Every one of us has the opportunity to make a difference every day of our lives.

And it's never too late.