Quotes from today’s Seattle Times…
At least 500 people packed Marlatt’s Funeral Home in Kent yesterday to remember Nirmal Singh Thind, a 44-year-old motel owner who was shot to death last week after protecting his 10-year-old son from robbers. Mourners filled the chapel and lobby while scores more gathered in the parking lot.
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“He came in the middle from nowhere,” Sadhu said. “He saved his son’s life and he saved my life, too.”
He was young, successful, a husband, a father and, at the age of 35 in 1992, newly retired thanks to cashing out some Microsoft stock options. Back then, he was a full-time dad coaching youth athletic teams and pondering whether he should learn to play the piano.
What changed him, making Ikeda a more sensitive man, a public figure and a proud Sansei — third-generation Japanese American — was a digital storybook called Densho that chronicles the Japanese-American internment during World War II.
Ikeda invented Densho. He had a scientist’s mind and the courage of a techie, which is to say he wasn’t afraid of the new or the unknown. The Web hadn’t become popular yet when Ikeda, who helped develop Microsoft’s first reference CD-ROMs, saw the possibilities and power of digitizing oral histories of the internees. And in the process, he uncovered a passion he had not known.
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“By training, I’m an engineer. A chemist. And science often looks at things (as) black and white. But I now understand the gray areas. The stories help me look at life. The stories, in a way, are the soul of my existence.”
“Often I’ve wondered what does it take for this to happen,” said the actress. “And now I know. It takes effort and grace … And in my life that grace has taken numerous forms. The first was the family into which I was born, parents who loved and wanted me, and a mother who fought fearlessly, courageously, consistently so that her children above all else could realize their full potential as human beings.”
