Bill Stricklin is a Phi Beta Kappa scholar who earned his AB with honors Phi Beta Kappa at University of California, Berkeley. He was elected President of the University of California's Young Republicans, elected Cal student body president and selected as the outstanding cadet of the United States Army ROTC program at UC Berkeley, trained at Fort Lewis; Infantry Officer Training School, Fort Benning, Georgia; Cold War spy-craft Counterintelligence cloak-and-dagger training at Fort Holabird, serving six years active and reserve, followed by a doctor of laws JD degree at Harvard Law School. After his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1964 Bill practiced law at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, San Francisco. Evenings Bill commuted to University of California Berkeley to study Japanese. Bill's trip to Japan followed during which he spoke in honorific Japanese to then-Crown Prince Akihito and then-Princess Michiko as Rotary International's guest. Pay was low, $7,200 per year. With law school student loans to repay and a family to support, temptations led Bill to accept a position at $35,000 per year with vague promises of "a piece of the action" in multi-million dollar construction projects. After a couple of years Bill accepted an offer to become Project Manager for the final work on the sixteen-story Insurance Center in San Francisco and Project Manager for the eleven-story Denny Building in Seattle Washington. In Honolulu Bill was project manager and minority owner of the twin twenty-story Amfac Center and later Bill practiced law there at Rush, Moore, Craven, Kim & Stricklin. In the evenings after his work, with the Governor's wife Beatrice Burns Bill studied the Hawai'ian language taught by a resident of the Island of Ni?ihau who told Bill about the Ni?ihau incident she had observed as a child which occurred in early Sunday morning December 7, 1941, through Saturday, December 13, 1941: Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service pilot Shigenori Nishikaichi crash-landed his Zero fighter monoplane on the Hawai'ian island of Ni?ihau after participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Bill's Hawai'ian language teacher's childhood observations are included here at Stave One. More tales follow in this book based on Bill's observations related to Pearl Harbor while living in Hawai'i.
