Worland Champion For WWII Japanese Americans Comes Home For Final Time

A Worland-born state champion high school quarterback, Harvard graduate, book editor, and knight of Japan for his successful efforts to achieve reparations for Japanese Americans put into camps during World War II, will come home for a final time in June.

Grant Ujifusa’s career as a writer and editor on the East Coast never uprooted the love he had for the community where his Japanese American family, through hard work and perseverance, became successful through three generations.

Ujifusa died at 82 from pulmonary fibrosis on Oct. 21, 2024. His death was chronicled in The New York Times and other publications.

But despite his impact on the East Coast world of publishing and politics, the Wyoming native made clear to his family that he wanted his resting place to be the family plot in the Worland cemetery next to his parents.

Oldest son Steven Ujifusa said the influence that Worland and the family’s sugar beet farm made on his dad through the first 18 years of his life never left him, despite the achievements and accolades he experienced in the decades that followed in New York City and his final home in Philadelphia.

“Worland was the center of the universe for the family,” Steven said. “For him, it was all about community. 

"He led this kind of dual existence, growing up in the Worland Methodist Church, he was involved in the Boy Scouts, the rocket club, but he also grew up in a house in which there were three generations of people including his immigrant grandparents, who were from Japan.”

His father spoke Japanese in the house, and on the outside the community saw a sugar beet farm in the middle of Wyoming, Steven Ujifusa said. 

But his dad’s “strong” bonds to the community had him through life identifying with and referring to his Wyoming upbringing and formative years.

“One thing that did bind them together was winning the 1959 state football championship in which he was quarterback,” Steven said. “So, he was kind of a hero in his class in that regard and that was a capstone of his academic career at Worland High School.”

Ujifusa’s family is bringing his ashes back to be buried in the family plot on June 20. 

A handful of classmates from his 1960 graduating class and championship 1959 football team plan to be there.

Fellowship Meal

High school and community friends are invited to join a fellowship meal celebrating his life at the Worland Community Center from 6-8 p.m. on June 19. 

A memorial service is set for 10 a.m. June 20 at Worland United Methodist Church.

A fellow football player from the 1958 team and Class of 1959. David Schlothauer, plans to be in town from his Park Hills, Kentucky, home to remember his friend.

Schlothaeur characterizes Ujifusa as an “outstanding” teen with a strong work ethic, a “playmaker” on the football field and a “one-of-a-kind” student who was at home with the athletes, intellectuals and musicians in the band, where Ujifusa played saxophone.

“It’s amazing he and Rick Hake came out of that small town and achieved their careers in different directions, but essentially to the same level of success,” Schlothauer said. 

Following his own graduation, Schlothauer went on to obtain a master’s degree from UCLA and helped design the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter for the U.S. Army, and then plan and design airports nationally and internationally.

Hake, of Menlo Park, California, said he and Ujifusa competed academically throughout their high school career. 

He was valedictorian of the Class of 1960 and Ujifusa the salutatorian. 

While Ujifusa took a full-ride scholarship to Harvard, Hake took one to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. 

Hake later received a doctorate in upper atmospheric physics at the University of Pittsburgh and worked for Lockheed Martin building satellites.

Lifelong Friendship

Hake’s high school friendship with Ujifusa helped remove any sense of division between the athletes and the “intellectual” students, Hake said. 

While he will not be able to get back to Worland to honor his friend, the pair stayed in touch through the years. 

“He visited me and I visited him on the East Coast and we continued to have the kind of discussions about changing the world when we met up in Wyoming for class reunions that we’d had in high school,” he said. “We ended up being very close friends up until the time that Grant died.”

Hake said one of the things they bonded on in high school was rocketry. 

After the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite in October 1957, Ujifusa became the catalyst to start a rocket club.

In a June 2022 oral history at the Washakie Museum, Ujifusa told his interviewer that he heard about Utah kids launching rockets and thought they would do that in Worland as well.

Their club, which included Hake, Schlothauer and others, got access to the school’s machine shop to build rockets. 

Ujifusa convinced the school’s chemistry professor to order powdered zinc, and the sulphur plant north of Worland yielded the material to mix a fuel.

A news story on the club was seen by a Saturday Evening Post photographer based in Salt Lake City, who came up and photographed the club launching a rocket.

A front-page story on the Casper Tribune-Herald on Feb. 27, 1958, told the story of their success before the magazine photographer.

“Worland Missile Rises 7,000 feet,” the headline reads. “The group first launched a rocket during the Christmas holidays and fired three more early this week for photographers from a national magazine, Saturday Evening Post.”

Another 1960 classmate, Cathy Healy, plans to be in town from her home in Washington, D.C., to pay respects to her friend. 

A former editor at National Geographic, Healy remembers participating in the Girl’s State government and civics program in Cheyenne the same week that Boy’s State was held and Ujifusa was elected governor.

“We all went to the Capitol and Grant came marching in as governor,” she said. “It was just so exciting.”

Healy recalled in more recent years she sent Ujifusa an introduction for a book she had compiled of her grandmother’s letters. She asked him to edit it. 

Healy got it back within three hours and “everything was exquisitely improved.”

Staying Connected

Ujifusa stayed in touch with her and others in their class and made sure they understood how important Worland was to him, she said. 

Healy said there were about 120 members in the Class of 1960 because Worland had an oil boom, and from the time of their birth in 1942 to graduation the town more than doubled in size.

“We were the sixth largest city in the state, five-time state champion football team until our sophomore year,” she said. “We felt like we were somebody.”

After Ujifusa chose Harvard over Yale, he made a name for himself in national political circles with other university friends by creating “The Almanac of American Politics” that detailed the characteristics of every congressional district in the United States as well as profiles on office holders including the U.S. senators and governors from each state. 

He went on to get a master’s degree in history at Brandeis University, a degree in American civilization from Brown University, and then jobs at book publishers Gambit, Houghton Mifflin, Random House, Macmillan, and then Reader’s Digest.

Because of his success with the almanac, Ujifusa was recruited by the Japanese American Citizens League to lobby Congress for reparations for all the Japanese who had been removed from the West Coast and interned at Heart Mountain in Wyoming and other camps across the West.

Ujifusa told interviewers at the Worland Museum on June 2, 2022, for his oral history that when he started his efforts the Japanese American Citizens League initially viewed him as “way too aggressive for them.”

But Ujifusa said he learned from his Worland football coaches that he was in it to win. 

The effort to get the reparations legislation through Congress and then signed by an initially reluctant President Ronald Reagan began in 1976 and took until Aug. 10, 1988.

“I would say the experience was the most important thing I did in life,” he told his interviewer. “And I was happy to have done it.”

That effort led to the Japanese government recognizing Ujifusa with the  “Order of the Rising Sun” which is the equivalent of a knighthood in Japan in January 2012.

Ujifusa’s middle son, Andrew, said his dad’s characterization of Worland as an all-American place that treated him and his family “like any other” in the community meant a lot to him as he left and entered Harvard, Brandeis and then work life in New York City.

“Even though he settled down on the East Coast and had his family there, I think he still appreciated the common sense of the people he grew up with,” he said. “He used to talk about his rancher buddies and how much he grew to understand and appreciate their perspective on the world.”

Swimming In Irrigation Canals

There were also stories of him swimming in the irrigation canals on the farm and how his strong-willed mother fought to see the hot springs in Thermopolis opened to Asians.

When he turned 14, Grant Ujifusa took Andrew on a special road trip to Worland with additional stops at Yellowstone National Park and then Denver. 

In Yellowstone, his dad drove up alongside a bison sauntering down the road to give his son a good look at it.

“He said, ‘Don’t touch it, because it will knock us right off the road,’” Andrew said. “I have a lot of fond memories of that trip.”

The Ujifusa’s 190-acre farm remains in the family with their land leased out to local farmers.

Both Steven and Andrew Ujifusa characterize their dad as someone who stayed humble despite all his success.

“He had this wonderful ability to talk to anyone,” Steven Ujifusa said. “He could talk to a farmer, talk to the gardener, but then he could be in elite settings in Washington and New York and talk to them. 

"He just had this tremendous curiosity of people and learning from them.”

Andrew Ujifusa said his dad was someone who lived the “great American life” and who always desired to return to the place of his roots at the end of it.

“I would have known from a very young age if you had asked me where my dad wanted to be laid to rest that it would have been in Worland,” he said. “In many ways it’s where he felt most at home all his life and he could always be reminded of his roots and how strong he had made them growing up.”

Friends planning to join the family for the June 19 meal at Worland Community Center, the former high school, are asked to RSVP Steven Ujifusa at steven.ujifusa@gmail.com.

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.