I should add that neither he nor his family members were eligible for redress payments since the internment order applied only to Japanese Americans in the three West Coast states. Grant grew up in Worland, Wyoming, on his parents’ sugar beet farm. He always had fond memories of Worland, where he excelled academically in high school and was quarterback on the high school football team. Dick Cheney, two years older and from nearby Casper (nearby by Wyoming standards — they’re 163 miles apart), has told me more than once that he remembers Grant from the days they played against each other.

Grant believed that his work on Japanese American redress was the crowning achievement of his life, and the awards he received for it are remembered in his obituary in the Pacific Citizen, the national newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League. Somewhat lower on the list, but also notable in my view and I think in that of many others, was his work in conceiving and bringing to repeated publication The Almanac of American Politics, which has appeared every two years beginning in November 1971. Grant’s original idea was to create a guide for students lobbying against the U.S. incursion into Cambodia in May 1970, with statistics and written descriptions of every member of Congress and every state and congressional district.

He asked me to join him because when we had met as members of the Harvard Crimson in 1963, he had told me he was from Worland, Wyoming, and I had replied, accurately at the time, that that was the western terminus of U.S. 16. As it happened, at age 12 or 13, I got hold of a detailed map of the U.S. number highways and made a list of the termini of each one from U.S. 1 to U.S. 101. U.S. 16’s eastern terminus was at the corner of Woodward and Grand River, across the street from the J.L. Hudson’s department store, in my hometown of Detroit. Grant remembered that no one else at Harvard had ever heard of Worland, and many had never heard of Wyoming, and he concluded that I would be helpful in writing state and district descriptions, as I did for going on 40 years.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

It soon became apparent to Grant and me and our third original co-author, Douglas Matthews, that such a book would be useful for people on all sides of every issue, and we tried, with increasing success, I hope, to make it useful to people of every persuasion who are interested in American politics. Doug’s and Grant’s involvement with the Almanac ended in time, and for most of the last 18 years, my involvement has been limited to writing an introductory essay. But it still carries on, co-authored most recently by Richard Cohen and Charlie Cook, and still containing at least in some historical descriptions some of my prose. I note that the price has increased somewhat from the original $4.95 up to close to the $140 I spent on my first piece of high-tech equipment, a Smith Corona portable electric typewriter, with the paperback just a bit more than the $110 I spent for my first pocket electronic calculator.

And so Grant Ujifusa changed my life, for the better, and I have him to thank for the opportunities I have had to do many other things over more than half a century, just as the many thousands of people who have used The Almanac of American Politics over the past 53 years have Grant to thank for the existence of a useful source of information that stands somewhere near, but not at the top of, his list of lifetime achievements. Thanks, Grant.