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ANCHORING CALIFORNIA
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"I think I have the persistence of a pitbull," Tokuda brags. The way she displayed that quality is what makes her proudest about this first small but important triumph. "It's worked well for me in life. They tell everyone no. Once somebody gives you the opportunity to show what you can do, that's the first cut. I work real hard. I'm a great researcher. I've never expected things to fall into my plate because they never have."
| "On the day of the date she called me at home at 10:30. She woke me up. She said, 'It's Wendy.' I said, 'Wendy who?'" |
Her self-professed pitbull qualities aside, Tokuda is modest, almost humble. "I think I'm good at communicating with people," she allows. Her looks? "It helps being attractive, yeah," she says a little defensively, "but I don't think it was the deciding factor. It it was, why didn't they make me a reporter from my first day at the station?"
Tokuda is touchingly forthright about acknowledging the role that her ethnicity has played in her success — in striking contrast to the strident denials I have heard from another successful Asian American anchor.
"I probably wouldn't have this job if it wasn't for the civil rights movement that fluorished and developed during the 60s."
Tokuda has always been a partisan of the movement that emerged in the 60s while she was in college. Nature and ecology are perhaps the aspects that have figured most importantly in her personal life. Her organic consciousness is evident in the way she maintained ties with her parents even after entering the professional world and the way she spent her time with them.
"I was really close to them. My dad and I would go mushroom-picking in the fall and in the spring and berry-picking in the summer. Every week I would see my parents and we would do stuff."
Within a year of becoming a reporter, Tokuda was promoted to the weekend anchor desk. She began attracting queries from stations across the country. One was from KPIX, San Francisco's CBS affiliate. It was looking for an Asian anchor to replace Kaitie Tong who had just left to go to Sacramento.
It was Tokuda's chance to take a big step up the career ladder. Reluctantly, she left behind her aging parents. A clause in her contract with KPIX stipulated that she be allowed out if there was a serious illness in her family. "It was in there until I had my own children. When I had my own children many years later, I realized that my home was now with my husband and we lived in the Bay Area."
Tokuda started as a reporter at KPIX at the beginning of 1978 when she was 27. She had hardly been at the station two months when Richard Hall was hired, fresh out of Yale, to be her assignment editor, writer and producer. According to Hall, son of Monty Hall of Let's Make a Deal fame, there were no immediate fireworks. They didn't even start dating until two months later in May.
"Our first date was a scandal," recalls Hall who is a year younger than Tokuda. "She asked me out, but between the time she asked me and the time of our date, there were a couple of days when we hadn't seen each other because we had different schedules. On the day of the date she called me at home at 10:30. She woke me up. She said, 'It's Wendy.' I said, 'Wendy who?' I had forgotten all about the date because my friend Joe had just come from New York and was staying with me. She said, 'Is it still on?' I said, 'You bet, but can Joe come?' I could tell she wasn't too happy about the idea but the three of us ended up having a great time. Joe sensed Wendy and I were hitting it off and asked to be dropped off early so we could continue the date by ourselves."
Despite the inauspicious beginning, Hall found himself falling "head over heels in love". Asked what about her captivated him, he cites first her "social consciousness".
"She is a committed environmentalist," he says. "She really spent a lot of time doing things in nature like mushroom-picking, berry-picking, hiking, camping. She's the one who introduced me to nature, the trees, the birds, the stars.
"On our third date I was telling her I thought we would end up getting married. She told me to shut up, it was too soon to start talking about marriage. She thought we should wait at least three months. We compromised and agreed to wait six weeks." Six weeks later, some time in late June when Tokuda had been promoted to weekend anchor, the subject came up again and the two became engaged, though not in the conventional way.
"I don't recall exactly how we came to be engaged," says Hall. Since neither embraced the conventions surrounding marriage, there was no proposal on bended knee, no engagement ring. But within days they were telling their incredulous parents that they expected to be married in November.
"My parents were like freaked out," recalls Hall. "We had to go down and have her meet the family. We also flew up to Seattle to meet her family." It wasn't so much that either set of parents was against the idea of interracial marriage. It was the suddenness of the announcement, and the natural concern that their children might abandon the culture they were raised in. In that respect, Hall believes, the Japanese and Jewish communities in America share identical concerns about what are sometimes seen as vanishing ethnic identities.
As it turned out the couple didn't get married until the following May. Just at that time the reform branch of American Judaism revised its doctrine — which once held that only the mother can perpetuate the lineage — to allow lineage to be carried by either the mother or the father. "I tell people they changed the rules for me," says Hall. He and Tokuda are raising their two children as Jews. PAGE 5
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