SEIKI – AN AMERICAN QUARTERBACK

By Hugh Wyatt


PROLOGUE

I first heard of Seiki Murono when I was coaching a minor league football team in Hagerstown, Maryland, in the early 1970s.

I'd seen his name on the statistic sheets of another minor league, and by chance I’d heard a friend named John Winterburn, a native of Vineland, New Jersey, talk about a great quarterback from his area (“South Jersey,” as its natives call it) - named Seiki Murono.

He was Japanese-American.  There haven’t been that many Japanese-American football players.

John pronounced his first name “SEE-key.”  I’ve since learned, from Seiki himself, that it’s properly pronounced “SAY-key.”

But that was that, for another 45 years or so, until the day I decided, for no particular reason, to do a little research on that Japanese-American quarterback.

First, I found a Seiki Murono who lived in San Francisco, where he was actively involved in business as an associate with an international executive search firm.

Further research connected him to Franklin and Marshall College, where, it turned out, he’d played football.

I’d found my man.

I managed to contact him by email, simply in hopes of exchanging stories of minor league football, but instead I managed to stumble onto an amazing life story - an inspiring American story. As a history major in college, it didn’t take me long to figure out that since he was just a few years younger than I, he almost certainly had experienced firsthand the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.

He confirmed this, and referred me to a book entitled “Connecticut Gridiron,”  a history of Northeastern minor-league and semi-professional football by William Ryczek, with whom he’d shared much of his family’s story.

And he sent me the text of his father’s post-war, post-internment testimony to a Congressional committee.

As I read, I realized that as bad as the internment of Japanese-Americans was, the injustice inflicted on the Murono family was almost beyond belief.  They weren’t Japanese-Americans at all.  They were Japanese-Peruvians.  They had been taken from their home and their business in Peru, and removed to the United States,  their lives uprooted  – for what?  

Whatever pretext there may have been to justify the internment by the US government of Japanese-Americans,  there was no possible way to argue that the Muronos, who had never set foot on American soil until being brought here and incarcerated, were a threat to American security.

What sort of people must Seiki’s parents have been, I wondered, to have suffered the injustices and indignities of the internment experience, but then to have resigned themselves to their fate and dedicated their efforts to ensuring that their children would achieve success as Americans - to have put bitterness aside and become, in time, American citizens themselves?

Like so many biographers,  I felt a sense of accompanying Seiki on his journey, checking with him from time to time as if to say, “Did I really see what I think I saw?”

The “journey” took me to Peru, to internment camps, to his hometown of Seabrook, New Jersey, and to his college, Franklin and Marshall, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Coincidentally, one of the first college games I ever saw took place at Franklin and Marshall, in 1950. The father of one of my friends was assigned to officiate a game there, and he took us two kids along.  An additional coincidence was learning that Ken Twiford, a high school teammate of mine, was an assistant at F & M when Seiki Murono played there.

In the process, I learned much of the life story of a very remarkable person, Seiki Murono;  but in learning about him, I also learned far more than I ever knew about the Japanese internment experience.

And I was reminded, once again, that when people come to America, often under the most unbelievably difficult of circumstances,  their decision to “become American” – to work hard and ensure that their children get educations - enriches us all.




THE QUARTERBACK

It was late Saturday afternoon, November 13, 1965.  Muhlenberg College had just gone down to defeat, 49-26, at the hands of Franklin and Marshall, but despite the sting of the loss,  the Muhlenberg coach marveled at the performance of F & M’s quarterback, Seiki Murono.

“Murono is the best quarterback we’ve seen in the past two years,” he told Jim Riley of the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer Journal. “No, I take that back.  He’s the best football player we’ve seen in two years… He does everything well and his leadership is fantastic.”

And  that was despite his having seen Seiki Mureno play just one half of football.   With a big halftime lead, F & M coach George Storck had chosen in the interests of sportsmanship to rest most of his starters, including Murono, in the second half. 

In that one half, though, Murono, a senior from Seabrook, New Jersey,  had accounted for 250 yards of total offense - 131 yards rushing and 119 yards passing.

In another week,  Seiki Murono would conclude an outstanding career at Franklin and Marshall, one in which he had set numerous school records for passing, punting and total offense, and one in which he had led a team that had been 1-7 his sophomore year – and had won a total of just four games in four years – to a perfect 8-0 record in his junior season and a 12-4 mark in his final two seasons.

In another six months, Seiki Murono  would graduate from Franklin and Marshall, a prestigious liberal arts college, and go on to a long and successful career in international banking.

In the meantime, few people, including his own teammates, had any idea that he had been making history as the only Japanese-American born in a World War II internment camp to play college football.

Twenty-two years earlier, Seiki Murono’s father, Ginzo Murono, had arrived in the United States from Peru.  His immigration was anything but voluntary. 

Late on the evening of January 6, 1943, Mr. Murono, a Peruvian of Japanese descent, the owner of two sporting goods stores with a wife and two small children, was approached at the door of his home in Lima by a Peruvian police officer and told, “by order of the United States government, you are hereby arrested.”  Thus ended his life in Peru and began nearly four years of incarceration.

(The shameful story of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the United States at the outbreak of World War II is now well known. Almost unknown, though, and never fully explained by the United States government, was the removal of Japanese from Latin-American countries, mainly Peru, for internment here. Author Thomas Connell, in his 2002 book, “America's Japanese Hostages,” suggests it was part of a goal of “a Japanese-free hemisphere.”)
 
Mr. Murono was taken first to a Lima police station, where along with 60 or so other Japanese men he spent the night in a room so small that it was impossible for any of them to lie down and sleep.

The next morning, the men were loaded onto three open-bed trucks and driven off.  Their journey, to a destination unknown to them, took two days.   It was summer in the southern hemisphere and the sun beat down fiercely.  No food was provided. “The trip,” Mr. Murono would recall later, “was a terrible one.”

“It was during this trip,” he would later tell a United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment, “that I began to feel the complete separation from the peaceful family and social life I had in Peru.  Without committing any wrong, and without even a hearing, our individual rights had been taken from us.”

On reaching their destination,  a seaport in the north, they were loaded onto a ship (“the bottom of the ship,” he would recall)  and after a three weeks-long voyage, during which time the passengers were fed just two meals a day, they arrived in San Francisco.

Without a visa – his had been confiscated by the Peruvian police -  Mr, Murono was considered an illegal alien, and was shipped by train to Kenedy Alien Detention Camp, in Kenedy, Texas, about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio.

In June, after six months at Kenedy, Mr. Murono was transferred to another internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. His wife, in the meantime,  had applied through the Spanish Embassy in Lima for admission to the United States, and when her request was granted, she and the Muronos’ two children, three-year old daughter Toyoko  and one-year-old son Eisuke, boarded a ship bound for New Orleans. The voyage, via the Panama Canal,  took two weeks.  There followed a two-day train ride to Crystal City, where in July, after seven months’ separation,  the Murono family was reunited.

Crystal City, about 120 miles southwest of San Antonio and not far from  the Rio Grande, was primarily for internees with families. There were as many as 1,000 Germans, and a small number of Italians, but the camp’s population was mostly Japanese, some 3,000 of them, roughly half from the United States and half from Peru.

Nearly a year after their reunion in Crystal City, the Muronos welcomed their third child, a son named Seiki.  It was June 6, 1944.  D-Day.

At Crystal City, the internees were paid 10 cents an hour for their work. Although kept under guard and behind barbed wire, they were given a remarkable amount of freedom within the camp itself.

The internees developed and ran what Mr. Murono recalled as “a rather efficient society,” electing their own officials and managing their own schools, their own post office, their own stores, and such essential services as garbage collection. They had newspapers, amateur theaters and sports teams. They had freedom of worship and the right to hold meetings.

The resourcefulness and resilience of a people suddenly and involuntarily yanked away from everything they owned, from familiar faces, places and things, and then, after incarceration, to make the best of such harsh circumstances, is almost incomprehensibly noble.

In August, 1945, more than two years after the Muronos had been reunited in Crystal City, “a long siren sounded,” Mr. Murono recalled.  “The war was over and peace had finally come.”

But while World War II may have ended, that did not mean freedom for the Muronos.   Like all Japanese Peruvians sent to the US, they had lost everything. There was no home to return to, no business to resume. 

And they were stateless.  Their passports had been taken away by the Peruvian government, and in the United States they remained "illegal aliens.” 

Finally, in August of 1946, a year after the war ended, so also did the Muronos’ four years of incarceration. They left Crystal City for a new life, in a strange and faraway place called Seabrook, New Jersey.

Seabrook, New Jersey was the home of Seabrook Farms,  a giant producer of vegetables, processing and packing  peas, beans, asparagus and other vegetables and fruits  grown on its 6,000 acres of farmland in rural southern New Jersey about five miles north of the city of Bridgeton.

Charles Franklin (C.F.) Seabrook had bought his father’s farm in 1912,  and by the outbreak of World War II, through his pioneering work in frozen food processing and his application of modern industrial production techniques to farming,  had built Seabrook Farms into what Life Magazine called ''The Biggest Vegetable Company on Earth.”

The largest single farm in New Jersey, Seabrook Farms was 9 square miles in size, with 30 miles of paved roads.  It had its own giant packing plant with enough railroad siding to allow the loading of 30 freight cars at a time.  At peak production it employed 4,000 workers, and shipped 100 million pounds of vegetables a year.

With the war effort requiring enormous amounts of food, Seabrook Farms became the major supplier of vegetables to the military.   But with most able-bodied men either in the service or employed in well-paying “war work,” it was difficult to find workers.

Seabrook Farms even employed hundreds of Italian immigrants and German prisoners of war, but even so, under constant pressure to fill government contracts, it  faced  a chronic labor shortage.

In 1943, partly to ease the problems of employers such as Seabrook, the US government began to  permit  many Japanese internees to leave the camps, provided they could pass a loyalty test and find jobs. They weren’t totally free to move about, though – their every move had to be approved by a government agency called the WRA – the War Relocation Authority. (And until December of 1944, the West Coast states remained off-limits to any former internees.)

Seabrook’s connection to the internment camps began in December of 1943. A recently-liberated former  internee named George Sakamoto, who had left his family behind at a camp in Colorado while he searched for a place to resettle, happened to be riding on a train to New York when he came across an article in Reader’s Digest about Seabrook Farms.

Seabrook needed workers, he read, and with the permission of the WRA,  he made his way to South Jersey to investigate.

Most of the other workers at Seabrook had never seen a Japanese person before, he recalled, and "they were curious as hell," Mr. Sakamoto told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Michael Vitez in June, 1988.  “They would come up and say, 'Hey, you don't look like the Japanese we see in the papers.' They were curious, but friendly."

He decided to stay, and went to work at 49 cents an hour.  Seeing him at work gave C. F. Seabrook an idea.  Where others saw internment camps, he saw workers -  and he set in motion a plan  to solve his labor shortage with  former internees.

Seabrook’s employment manager was commissioned to visit camps and recruit workers. “Come and see for yourself,” he told internees at an Arkansas internment camp in April of 1944. “We’ll pay your transportation.”

Shortly after, a delegation of three representatives from the camp visited Seabrook, talking with workers and local business people and government officials to assess how Japanese-Americans would be accepted.

Their report upon their return must have been favorable, because shortly afterward, families began to leave for Seabrook, and in time, more than 300 families from that one camp in Arkansas would accept Seabrook’s offer.

The government paid their train fare to Seabrook, and the company agreed to provide lodging, lunch, and utilities. To house them, Seabrook had managed to get the federal government to build a large number of small concrete block homes.  For their part, the Japanese-Americans were required to work in Seabrook's processing plant for at least six months.

Eventually, following the initial wave of workers from Arkansas, families began to arrive in Seabrook from internment camps in Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

"They were put to work as soon as they got here, as soon as they changed their shoes," George Sakamoto recalled. "You got here in the afternoon and went to work on the night shift."

The work was hard and long - 12-hour shifts – and the pay was low - anywhere from 35 to 50 cents an hour. During peak harvest periods they worked seven days a week.

Essentially, Seabrook was a company town.  Seabrook Farms owned the houses and the only store in town. The nearest other store was in Bridgeton, five miles away, but to people with no cars, not to mention wartime rationing of gasoline, it might as well have been 50 miles.

The workers nevertheless made the best of their circumstances.

"Some people might say C.F. was an opportunist, taking advantage of our situation," said George Sakamoto. "But what the hell. We were in bad shape, we needed a chance. And for people in our situation, it was hard to say no."

The Seabrook that Seiki Murono grew up in was a remarkably diverse community.  The German and Italian prisoners of war had left Seabrook once the war ended, their places taken by Peruvian-Japanese like the Muronos, and by Estonians, who had fled their country when the Russians swept through Eastern Europe following the war.  There was no segregation by race or nationality. The various groups were integrated and, in Seiki’s words, “lived harmoniously together.”

The Muronos lived in a one-room house, with a coal burning stove for heat. There was no bathroom.  “There was a communal bathroom and shower facility which was used by all the residents of the complex,” Seiki recalled.  “I remember how terrible it was to have to walk to and from the bath facility during our frigid winters.”

Because Mr. Murono’s income wasn’t sufficient to support the family, Mrs. Murono had to go to work, too, which meant that two-year-old Seiki was sent to a child care center run for the families of Seabrook’s workers.

Until he entered Seabrook Elementary School, Seiki Murono spoke no English. At school, the Japanese and Estonian children were taught English as a second language. “It was quite a struggle at first,” Seiki now  recalls, “since my parents, who knew almost no English, spoke only Japanese at home.  It was a priority for me to learn English so that I could fit in.”

Seiki’s parents never studied English, Seiki says, but they became proficient,  “through day-to-day living and watching TV.”
 
Looking back, Seiki Murono recalls a childhood that could have been spent almost any place in America… … “Opening day of trout fishing season in April at Pennsgrove Lake and Shaws Mill Pond near Cedarville…  Waiting to hear the jingle from the Mr. Softee truck so I could buy my root beer float…  The Boy Scout troop under the leadership of Vernon Ichisaka.” (Numerous Japanese-American children from Seabrook became Eagle scouts.)

Seabrook’s kids played kick the can and Red Rover… And marbles (“our earliest introduction to gambling, because whatever you won, you got to keep,” recalled one of Seiki’s contemporaries). 

And they also took part in activities unique to a Japanese community – playing a game called jin-tori, said to be something like capture the flag, and making mochi, a Japanese treat.

As Seiki grew older, there were pickup games of all sports.
   
There was basketball on the outdoor court at the elementary school.

There was baseball, which, as one schoolmate of Seiki’s recalled, meant  “sharing baseball gloves after each inning because not everyone owned one… a couple of bats, and an adhesive-taped ball that had to last the whole game... the team at bat designating one of its own players to call balls and strikes and each team keeping its own score, an arrangement that produced surprisingly few arguments… base runners stealing second base without sliding, to avoid tearing their pants or skinning their knees on the rock-hard ground.

And there was football. Seiki recalled “being chased away by Mr. Miller, the Seabrook School custodian, when we were playing football on the lawn in front of the school.” Added a schoolmate, “When we didn’t see his pickup truck parked by the school, we would play football. As we played, we would keep an eye out for his pickup coming down Highway 77. When someone saw it we would all scatter.”

Not that it was all play. Not by any means.  “I don't remember ever taking a family vacation,” Seiki said.   “From the time each of the children was 13 (the minimum working age at the time), we all had summer jobs.” He remembers picking beans, “making 35 cents a basket, and chasing rabbits to break up the monotony.”

And there was schoolwork.  In keeping with the emphasis on education and the desire to excel academically characteristic of Asian-Americans in general, Seiki says,  “My parents stressed education and wanted all three of us to get a college education. We were encouraged to study hard and we did this mostly at home since our community did not have a library.”

Whether at school or at play, though, Seiki said, he and his brother strove to excel.

“My brother and I embraced the American ethic of competing to succeed,” he says. “We both wanted to excel both academically and athletically to prove we belonged.”

In the fall of 1958, Seiki and his classmates from Seabrook Elementary moved on to high school in nearby Bridgeton,  a city of 20,000 or so, with one large high school.  Bridgeton High School was itself quite diverse, with a fairly large African-American population, and the Japanese-American kids from Seabrook had no trouble  fitting in.

“We were very well accepted,” Seiki remembered.   “Most of the Japanese kids excelled in school and participated in athletics, mostly basketball, baseball and football.”

At Bridgeton, Seiki played all three of those sports.

He almost didn’t play football. As a freshman, he weighed just 119 pounds, and thought seriously about quitting.  “I questioned whether or not I could match up physically with some guys who were 100 pounds heavier than that,” he said. “I decided to hang in there, and was glad I did.”

As a quarterback, he especially admired the Baltimore Colts’ Johnny Unitas, “I didn't view him as a gifted athlete,” he said, “but someone who made the most out of what he was given.  He was steady, consistent and reliable, and someone who almost always delivered in the clutch.”

In his senior year, in order to make better use of Seiki’s talents as a runner and a passer, his coach, Barney Fisher, installed a single-wing attack, with Seiki as tailback doing most of the running and passing. Bridgeton won the South Jersey Group IV (largest classification) football championship, and Seiki was named first team all-conference quarterback and the conference MVP.

In the spring, with Seiki at second base, the Bridgeton High baseball team also won the South Jersey Group IV championship.

He was co-captain of both the football and baseball teams, and the president of his senior class,  and he graduated with honors.

And then it was off to college. Remarkably, nearly all of the Japanese students in his class at Bridgeton went on to college, to schools such as Rutgers, Tufts, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Dickinson, Delaware, Bucknell, West Virginia Wesleyan, Trenton State (Now College of New Jersey), Ryder, Drexel, and Penn.

For Seiki, the choice was Franklin and Marshall, a small, well-respected  liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Partly, he admitted, he chose F & M because his brother, Eisuke, was a sophomore there and a member of the football team.  (Eisuke had chosen F & M because of its strong science department.) Mainly, though, Seiki chose F & M “because it was an excellent liberal arts college where I could play football and baseball and get a high quality education.” 

When Seiki arrived on campus in the fall of 1962,  he wasn’t entirely unknown. His brother had already established himself as the starting fullback on the varsity football squad.  And his coach at Bridgeton, Barney Fisher,  had made sure to let the F & M coaches know what sort of athlete they were getting in Seiki. 

On the freshman squad (NCAA rules at the time prohibited freshmen from playing varsity football),  Seiki played both quarterback and defensive back.  While the varsity team  struggled and went winless,  the freshmen team, playing an abbreviated schedule,  finished with an encouraging 2-1 record.

As he entered his sophomore year, the F & M Diplomats had won just three varsity games in three years.  But change was under way - a new coach, a West Point graduate named George Storck, had come on board, and he quickly saw what a talent he had in his sophomore quarterback, Seiki Murono.  With new substitution rules allowing Seiki to concentrate on offense;  Storck installed a sprint-out, run-pass-option offense to take full advantage of his quarterback’s skills. 

Unfortunately, a shoulder separation suffered in an early game hampered Seiki’s play for most of the season, and F & M limped home with just one win. 

His injury not only delivered a setback to the coach’s rebuilding plan, but also cut short Seiki’s one season of playing on the same college team as his brother, by then the team co-captain. Ironically, Eisuke’s season was also limited by injury.

The 1964 season began with high hopes.  In pre-season scrimmages, then commonplace among colleges, the Diplomats held their own against Lebanon Valley and Upsala.  An impressed Coach Storck called the performances “the best football I have seen Franklin and Marshall play.”

If they needed further reason for optimism as they prepared for the season opener in Baltimore against Johns Hopkins, the school newspaper pointed out that with junior Seiki Murono set to start at quarterback, it would mark the first time since 1959 that F & M had not opened the season with an untested sophomore at that key position.

With Seiki completing 17 of 23 passes for 181 yards, the Diplomats ended a 6-game losing streak, defeating Hopkins, 21-6. 

Swarthmore was  next. Although F & M led only 7-6 going into the fourth quarter, they scored twice to win, 21-12. Seiki threw only five passes, but he completed  four for 46 yards, and he ran for two touchdowns.

The next week  in a downpour, F & M struggled to pull out a win over Dickinson by the unlikely score of 6-5.  Just two minutes into the game, Seiki was tackled in the end zone for a safety, and a field goal shortly afterward gave Dickinson an unusual 5-0 lead.  Hampered offensively by the weather, Seiki threw for just 109 yards, but one of his 13 completions was the winner - a 33-yard touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter. The win made the Diplomats 3-0 for the first time since 1953.

With win number four over Carnegie Tech, 18-14, the Diplomats equaled the total number of wins by the school in the previous four years.   Although down 14-10 after 3 quarters, the Diplomats put together a late scoring drive, with Seiki sneaking over from the 1 and  then passing for the two-point conversion.

Haverford was next, and the Fords led 6-0 going into the fourth quarter, but Seiki engineered two touchdown drives in the final 10 minutes to pull out a 14-6 win.

Pennsylvania Military (now Widener University) was the third straight opponent to take the game down to the wire,  scoring with only a minute to play to take a 17-13 lead.  But Seiki drove the Diplomats  60 yards in less than a minute, scoring from the one with seconds left  to give F & M the 19-17 win.  He was  13 of 21 for 237 yards passing.

Against Muhlenberg, in what the school newspaper called “The most brilliant performance of his intercollegiate career,” Seiki completed 24 of 35, passing for  320 yards and three touchdowns and running for a fourth, as F & M triumphed,  29-20,

Ursinus was the final opponent, and the Bears went down, 20-6 as  Seiki completed 18 of 25 for 130 yards, and ran for a touchdown.

The Franklin and Marshall Diplomats , 8-0, had finished a season unbeaten for the first time since 1950, and for only the second time in the school’s long history of football dating back to 1887.

The jubilant home crowd, as had become its custom throughout the season, tore down the goal posts, and then followed an impromptu motorcade, taking the coaches and the players on a “triumphant march,” in the school newspaper’s words, through downtown Lancaster.

It had been quite a  season for Seiki Murono.   He accounted for 1150 yards of total offense, completing 108 of 180 pass attempts for 1021 yards and six touchdowns, and rushing 90 times for 129 yards and 7 touchdowns.  He led his league’s division in passing, punting and total offense.

The honors poured in.

In recognition of his efforts, Seiki was honored by Philadelphia’s Maxwell Football Club.

He became the first F & M player since 1960 to be named to the all-conference team,  and was named the conference MVP.

“He’s every bit deserving of this honor,” Coach Storck told the F & M College Reporter. “My contention at the beginning of the season that Seiki was the finest quarterback in the conference has certainly been proven.  Moreover, he’s withstood an awful lot of pressure and he’s come through.  He’s modest and accepts the limelight as a team member, not a star.  His humble approach makes him greater.”  

Seiki played baseball in the spring of his junior year, and after a summer working as a Coca-Cola route salesman in South Jersey, as he’d done throughout his college career, he returned to F & M with high hopes for his senior season.

Elected co-captain, his importance to the team was summed up by his coach’s referring to him in Sports Illustrated’s pre-season issue as “the offense.”

Alas, although Seiki had another good year offensively, the Diplomats were unable to duplicate the magic of the previous season, and finished  a somewhat disappointing 4-4.

Nevertheless, for the second consecutive season,  Seiki was named the league’s Most Valuable Player.  He passed for 888 yards and nine touchdowns, and ran for 363 yards and four touchdowns.  In addition, he punted 31 times for a 34.4 yard average. 

In what was essentially a two-year career, Seiki Murono accounted for 2671 yards and 29 touchdowns on 552 plays, and punted 120 times for 4305 yards.

He was accorded an honor seldom conferred on a small college player when he was named second team All-Pennsylvania (one of his teammates: a Pitt lineman named Marty Schottenheimer, who would go on to fame as an NFL head coach).

And in his home state of New Jersey, he was named the Brooks-Irvine Memorial Football Club’s College Player of the Year, recognizing him as the outstanding college football player from South Jersey.   (Winners over the years  have included such college All-Americans as Penn State’s Franco Harris,  Lydell Mitchell and Greg Buttle,  Nebraska’s Mike Rozier and Irving Fryar, and Wisconsin’s Ron Dayne. Rozier and Dayne won Heisman Trophies; Rozier, Harris, Mitchell and Fryar all went on to make Pro Bowl appearances.)

As well as being co-captain of both the football and baseball teams, he was also President of Franklin and Marshall's Black Pyramid Senior Honor Society, whose members, according to its site,  “are chosen through a rigorous screening of academic intellectuality, extracurricular activities, and community involvement.”

He graduated with honors in business management as his proud parents and his paternal grandmother, who flew in from Kyoto, Japan looked on with pride.

And then it was on to business school at the American University in Washington, D.C. where he would earn an MBA degree, specializing in international finance.

Although his studies went well,  he missed football, and after a year away from the game, he signed a contract to play for the Westchester (New York) Bulls of the Atlantic Coast Football League.  The Bulls were a minor league affiliate of the New York Giants and the two head coaches for whom Seiki played were former Giants Alan Webb and Joe Walton.  (Alan Webb’s appointment made him the first black head coach of a professional football team at any level. Joe Walton would later become head coach of the New York Jets from 1983-1989.)

In the 1960s and early 1970s, there actually was such a thing as minor league professional football, and the quality of play was quite high.

In 1967, when Seiki signed to play, there were just 24 major league professional football teams - 15 in the National Football League and nine in the American Football League -  instead of  today’s 32.  And those 24 teams carried rosters of just 40 men each, which meant there was a total of just 960 jobs in major league professional football. By contrast, today’s 32-team NFL has 53-man rosters, providing 1696 job opportunities for players. In other words, in 1967  there were more than than 700 football players good enough by today’s standards to be on an NFL roster, but without a team to play for.  Many of those “unemployed” chose to remain active, playing the game they knew and loved, on minor league teams.

Having been cut by NFL or AFL teams,  they played on in hopes of getting another chance at the big time.  Few of them made much money doing so. Most of them had outside jobs,  Many had families. Many were students. Whatever their reason for playing,  at heart they were all playing for fun, postponing the inevitable day when they’d no longer be able to play a sport they’d loved since they were kids.

The best of them found their way to the Atlantic Coast Football League, whose best (and best-financed) teams were in Hartford and Bridgeport, Connecticut and Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

From the ACFL, some did make it to the NFL. There was Bob Tucker, a tight end from Bloomsburg State who played for the Pottstown Firebirds before getting his chance with the New York Giants. He took advantage of it and lasted for 11 seasons in the NFL.

Marv Hubbard signed with the Hartford Knights out of Colgate, and wound up an All-Pro running back with the Oakland Raiders.

Chuck Mercein, a running back from Yale, was drafted by the New York Giants and sent down for two games to the Westchester Bulls before being cut. And then, in mid-season, Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi signed him, and his running on the “frozen tundra”  of Green Bay was a key factor in the  Packers’1967 Ice Bowl victory over the Dallas Cowboys..

The success of many minor league players extended well beyond their playing days.

Bob Brodhead, a Duke graduate, was twice named All-Continental League quarterback for the Philadelphia Bulldogs, and went on to be Athletic Director at LSU.

Gary Van Galder,  captain of Stanford’s 1957 team, was a student at Yale medical school in 1962 when he was coaxed into playing for the Ansonia (Connecticut) Black Knights.

Don Abbey, a big fullback/linebacker from Penn State, played briefly for the Hartford Knights in 1970 before embarking on a career in commercial real estate in Southern California that would make him one of America’s wealthiest men.

Jack Dolbin, an all-ACC running back at Wake Forest, played minor league football with the Pottstown Firebirds and the Schuylkill Coal Crackers of the Seaboard League, and spent a year with the Chicago Fire of the World Football League before signing with the Denver Broncos. He started 67 games for the Broncos, and was the leading receiver in Super Bowl XII.  He’s now Dr. Jack Dolbin, owner of a sports and rehabilitation center in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. 

Seiki Murono’s balancing act between the demands of his career and his love of football was not an uncommon one at the time, especially for quarterbacks.

Bob Brodhead, in his book, “Sacked,” told how he was forced to juggle careers when his team, the Cleveland Bulldogs of the United Football League, first moved to Canton, Ohio, then was acquired by a group of Philadelphia businessmen, with plans to play in the newly-formed Continental Football League.

The Philadelphia group wanted Brodhead, who had just been named MVP of the United Football League, as part of the deal. 

The problem, he wrote,  was that “I couldn’t afford to quit my job in Cleveland and move to Philly for what they paid me to play football.”

When the owners proposed flying him in for practice two nights a week, and then to wherever the team happened to be playing on the weekend, he accepted their offer.

As he described his routine, “Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the season saw me hard at work as general manager of A. J. Gates Company, a Cleveland-based materials-handling firm.  Late Wednesday afternoons, I’d hop a plane for the fifty-minute flight to Philadelphia.  I’d practice on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, sleeping at the Germantown YMCA, fly home for work on Fridays, then join the team on Saturdays in cities from Toronto, Canada to Orlando, Florida.”

Seiki Murono’s arrangement with the Westchester Bulls was similar: his school work meant frequent travel between Washington and New York.  “Playing for the Bulls while getting my MBA,” he recalled,  “required taking the Eastern Airlines shuttle between DC and New York 3-4 times a week for both practice and games.  It was a crazy thing to do now that I look back, but at the time, it was exciting and fun.”

The following spring, he was tempted briefly to stray from his career path. His college coach, George Storck, had resigned his position at F & M to return to West Point as freshman football coach and associate athletic director, and  he asked if Seiki might be interested in joining him as an assistant coach. But Seiki, about to graduate from American with his MBA degree, decided instead to enter Chase Manhattan Bank’s management training program in New York.

Meanwhile,  he continued to play minor league football.  Surprisingly, he had the blessing of his superiors at Chase Manhattan. “They loved it,” he told William Ryczek, in “Connecticut Gridiron.”  “They put articles in the Chase newsletter. I worked on the same floor with the person who  eventually became president of the bank, and every Monday he’d say, ‘Well, how did we do this weekend?’  They loved the fact that I was a professional at the bank and playing professional football at the same time.”  

As with other minor league players, making money was not Seiki’s main objective.  He simply enjoyed playing football, and was realistic about his chances of playing in the NFL: “I realized that was probably going to be the pinnacle of my football career,” he said, “and I was going to play as long as I could, while dedicating most of my energy and attention to my banking career.” 

By 1973, though, the physical toll of football combined with the increasing responsibilities of his position with Chase Manhattan to persuade him that it was time to focus on his banking career.

He never looked back.

Although the birth of the World Football League in 1974 created enticing new opportunities in professional football, he never considered it. “The WFL was a cut above the Atlantic Coast Football League,” he says,  “And I was realistic about my ability to compete at that level.”

Thus was launched a career with Chase Manhattan that spanned 25 years (and “3.1 million miles on United Airlines,” he notes),  starting in New York and taking him to increasingly responsible positions in Singapore, Hong Kong and San Francisco.

In Singapore, he was Southeast Asia Regional Manager for consumer and private banking in addition to running all of Chase’s Southeast Asia credit card operations.

In Hong Kong, he was Asia Pacific Area Executive for private banking,  responsible for more than $6 billion in clients’ assets.

In his last position, based in San Francisco, he was Senior Vice President of The Chase Manhattan Bank, and President of the Chase Manhattan Trust Company of California.

After retiring from Chase Manhattan in 1995, Seiki became Chairman of the Board of San Francisco-based Millennium Bank, which was sold in 2000.  He currently serves on the board of directors of California Business Bank, based in Irvine, and Millennium Capital, a Shanghai-based investment bank.

He also is a Partner in the San Francisco office of Boyden Global Executive Search, specializing in senior-level financial services searches.

By any measurement, Seiki Murono represents the fulfillment of the American dream.

He’s done it the classic American way – through hard work, dedication and persistence, and with the support of a loving, caring family and good mentors.

And football, as he will freely admit, has played a key role in his success.


POSTLOGUE

Looking back at a long and varied career that’s taken him from an internment camp, to a company town, to a small and selective college, to athletic success in college and professional sports, to the acme of international business, Seiki reflects on the factors that helped make him successful.

From an early age, the sense of “belonging” was a powerful motivator.  “When I was growing up,” Seiki says, “I thought about being ‘different’ constantly and did whatever I could to be accepted and excel in everything I did.  It was the driving force in my early years which shaped who and what I became.”

Playing sports, he says, was “huge,” in terms of his overall development. “I felt most ‘American’,” he said,  “When I was playing sports.  It was probably the main reason I chose to participate in athletics...to assimilate and to gain acceptance.”

Teachers and coaches, football and family have been major forces in his life…

“My high school English teacher, Mrs. Jane Owen, was very special,” he says.  “She made sure I learned how to speak proper English by teaching me how to diagram sentences and conjugate verbs.  To this day, I remember and use what she taught me.  When I was a senior in high school, it was she who suggested I consider a career in international banking.  Amazing, since I had no idea what international banking was!”

Two other important influences were his football coaches – Barney Fisher at Bridgeton High School, and George Storck at Franklin and Marshall.  “Both,” he said,  “were exceptional mentors. from whom I learned so much about life skills, leadership and being a decent human being.”

F & M, he says now,  “Was a very good choice.  I received a terrific education and had the opportunity to play for a great football coach. Football - and the positive influence of Coach Storck  - laid the foundation for my career in business.  Playing team sports, especially as a quarterback, taught me leadership skills and the importance of cooperation and collaboration as keys to achieving success and reaching objectives.”

But most important of all were his parents.

Other than the abduction of Ginzo Murono and the separation from the life the Muronos knew in Peru, and other than the fact that incarceration was their introduction to the United States, the Muronos were like so many other immigrants to the United States in the manner in which they worked and sacrificed to give their children opportunities that they knew they would never have themselves.

At one point they considered moving back back to Peru, Seiki says, but they chose to remain in the US because they wanted all three of their children to be educated here, and they thought opportunities would be better for them here.

“They believed that we could make it,” Seiki says. “And the key was for all of us to receive a good education.  They made tremendous sacrifices so that we could achieve this objective.”

In return, he said, “We wanted to make our parents proud and bring them honor for the sacrifices they made.”

The Muronos must surely have felt honored and repaid by the accomplishments of their children.

In addition to Seiki, older brother Eisuke earned his PhD in endocrinology and was a senior scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and taught at the medical schools at the University of South Carolina and at West Virginia University.

Older sister Toyoko graduated from Columbia University.  While still an undergraduate, she began working in the Foreign Admissions Office, and continued to work there after graduation, overseeing applications from foreign students hoping to attend Columbia.

It is remarkable to think of what the Muronos did for the sake of their children.  Dealt an unfair hand in life, they stoically resigned themselves to their lot and made the best of their situation. Ginzo Murono, his business in Peru taken from him without compensation, worked at Seabrook Farms until his retirement.

Amazingly, Seiki said he never heard his father complain or display anger over the injustices he and his family had suffered. 

“My father was a saint,” Seiki says.   “He never expressed or showed any kind of bitterness as a result of being interned.  In the end, he was grateful and proud to be an American citizen and appreciated all the opportunities that this country afforded his children.  He was especially proud of the fact that all his children received college degrees and went on to have successful professional careers.”

Seiki does concede that there were occasions in both high school and  college where he was the target of discrimination and racial slurs directed at him by opposing players. 

But his professional career was quite different.  “During my entire 26 years at the Chase Manhattan Bank,” he says,  “I was always treated fairly and with respect and consider it a privilege to have worked there.”

He notes that the subject of the Japanese internment was never mentioned in high school, and that during the time he was in college, very little had been written about the internment. As a consequence, very few of his classmates or teammates at F & M knew anything about it.  “Most,” he says,  “were surprised and shocked to hear the story.” 

Growing up, Seiki said, he was reluctant to discuss the subject of the Japanese internment, because, “One of my primary objectives was to gain acceptance,  assimilate, and look as ‘American’ as possible.” 

Now, he says, “I am more willing to speak about it.  My hope is that as more is written about the internment experience, it will foster a greater understanding of the perils of prejudice and discrimination and lessen the likelihood that these types of injustice are repeated.”

He sums up the way his parents and other Japanese interns dealt with the difficulties of their lives:  "There's a word in Japanese: gaman – to endure," he says. "My parents used to say that one's ability to endure hardship prepares one for life."