I recently reconnected with an administrator I met while I was in college. And what transpired was a conversation with a man who is living a wonderful philanthropic life.

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I recently reconnected with an administrator I met while I was in college. And what transpired was a conversation with a man who is living a wonderful philanthropic life.

Herb Yamanaka was an events manager at the University of Oregon back in the mid-1970s. He used to call me “Pineapple,” an inside joke between two people from Hawaii. We’d bump into each other at the UO athletic department while I was a student volunteer and gofer and he was on the athletic staff.

It’s not often one can chat with someone who was born before World War II, had relatives in internment camps, experienced racism for the first time in college, and was in college before Hawaii became a state.

Guess what, that man is still at UO — all 92 years young on Aug. 13 — as an associate athletic director focusing on major donor giving.

Yamanaka is gregarious, humble, benevolent and generous. The Army vet once rejected Nike founder Phil Knight’s open checkbook offer for a memento and was the wingman for legendary former Oregon football coach and athletic director Len Casanova. He enjoys deep-sea fishing, going three times a year. In early August, he landed a bluefin tuna while angling in San Diego.

But little did I know that the Kohala High graduate has maintained a connection to Hawaii by establishing an athletic scholarship for a Hawaii athlete in 1995.

Some of the recipients included future NFL stars Max Unger (he had it for five years) and DeForest Buckner and current Oregon offensive lineman and former Kapaa All-State player Kawika Rogers. Golfers who also were recipients of the Herb &Donna Yamanaka Endowed Athletic Scholarship included Baldwin’s Cassy Isagawa (2010 state champion) and Honokaa’s Sean Maekawa (2007 champion).

“He’s the nicest guy and he’s the perfect person for what he does for the athletic department,” said Maekawa, who is now a golf coach at Hawaii Hilo. “He embodies what the athletic department is about. He’s so friendly … and his positive energy just makes you gravitate towards him. He’s awesome.”

Yamanaka was born in Kailua-Kona in 1934 but moved to Kohala, “where there was more water.” He graduated from Kohala in 1952 but did not play sports.

“I was too slow and too small,” Yamanaka said. “I was a 130-pound senior in high school, 5-foot-3 or 5-4. Now I’m 5-7. I grew while I was in college.”

Said Maekawa: “He was my grandpa’s classmate at Kohala High School. That was pretty cool to have that connection.”

Yamanaka was accepted into the University of Oregon under a reciprocity rule, basically an exchange program where students from Hawaii could go to UO and pay in-state tuition and vice versa.

“My (in-state) tuition was $55 a term ($165 a year for the three terms) and room and board was $72.50 (per month),” he said.

Tuition and fees for residents this academic year is $17,475, according to UO cost of attendance figures. Non-resident tuition costs is $47,466. If you add in on-campus housing and food, that total is $65,649 a year.

It was in college where Yamanaka faced racism for the first time.

“I didn’t know about racism. In Hawaii, you didn’t care if you were Mexican, white, Black, Portuguese, we all worked together.”

But after becoming the first pledge of Asian descent to be accepted into a fraternity (Tau Kappa Epsilon), he was not always welcomed by other frats. He said he was told he could “’come over, but you can’t come in.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ” Yamanaka was told they would stamp his card to show that he was there, but he wasn’t allowed to come in and mingle.

Yamanaka said sports helped quell that for him.

“(It was) about the Rose Bowl time, 1956-57-58, where I felt comfortable, that everybody was equal. We were all yelling together, cheering for the Ducks. … Our players were all different, so it didn’t matter. It just brought camaraderie. So you cheered together, huddled together, you yelled and screamed and partied, so that totally helped.”

He said he should have graduated from Oregon in 1956 but stayed in school, taught chemistry at the school of nursing on campus to pay for classes, and took three hours each term to avoid being drafted into the service.

“In 1958, they caught up with me so I had to go,” he said.

With a degree in biology, Yamanaka went to the “medical research and nutrition laboratory (at Fitzsimons Hospital) in Denver, Colo., working in the pathology department.”

He said he was supposed to get out in two years but was given a project called the Protein Histochemistry of Amyloidosis, finding the amino acids that constituted amyloids that can affect liver, kidney, spleen and other tissues.

“The major said, if you don’t finish this project in time, you’re going to be extended and you’re going to stay in the Army until you finish. So I said, ‘If I finish the project can I get out early?’

“He says, if you finish the project and it’s published you can get out. So in 18 months I get out of the service and published the paper in the pathology journal.”

Yamanaka returned to Eugene, Ore., and started working for the athletic department in 1960 and “stayed here ever since. I’m still here.”

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He started as an events manager, and later got promoted to handling football travel for then-coach Casanova and Rich Brooks and all the coaches for 17 years. He’s also worked for 12 UO athletic directors.

He never went back into pathology or research despite his experience and expertise.

“In pathology, I worked with animals that were dead or dying. It was morbid. I looked down a microscope all day, cutting tissues,” he said. “In athletics, there were young 18-, 21-year-old kids, energetic and everything else. It was more (in) my line because I love people.”

The idea behind providing a scholarship to 18- to 21-year-olds, however, might have been planted decades ago.

“My grandmother and grandfather in Kohala raised us during the war till graduation,” he said. “I used to gripe about how strict they were, that we never ate out, never went on vacation.”

“I went home one year, and she was dying of cancer. She says sit right here, ‘Remember how your brothers and sisters used to gripe about how cruel we were, never went on vacation and everything?’ I said, ‘yes.’ She says we built eight houses while you were here and we rented them out. ‘When grandpa and I die, these houses belong to you folks, so who were we working for?’

“I grew up right then.”

When his grandparents died, Yamanaka said, they sold the houses, and since he and his wife felt they didn’t need the money, “we said let’s do something to honor grandma and grandpa. So we established a scholarship in their name. … It’s listed as Herb &Donna Yamanaka made possible by Mr. and Mrs. C. Yamanaka.”

Donna is actually Herb’s second wife. They met on a blind date 40 years ago and “we’ve been happy ever since.” His first wife passed away. Together they had three children and he now has four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

He said the scholarship started with $60,000 that was doubled by a matching gift. “Each year you add on to it. At first you could pay for a scholarship, but today, with the scholarship being $60,-$70,000 every nine months, it doesn’t pay for a full scholarship.”

Yamanaka’s job at UO now is “acquisition of appreciated properties. That is people who amass a lot of fortune but can’t take the money to heaven, so we do charitable trusts through an attorney to leave money for the university and they get to write off whatever they gave in income tax.

“I made a lot friends with Len Casanova, our football coach at that time (1951-66). I worked with him for 50 years, but when he died, all these big donors wanted to work with me because we established a relationship. So I was the person who asked them for big bucks.”

Yamanaka has been tied to almost every on-campus sports project, “from the opening (and renovating) of Autzen Stadium (to) the football building, the soccer field, the lacrosse field, the baseball and softball fields.” He’s been a recipient of numerous lifetime awards and has conference rooms named after him in the Casanova Center and at Jane Sanders (softball) Stadium.

Yamanaka has many fond memories, but there are a few that stand out.

When Casanova died in 2002, the family presented Yamanaka with Casanova’s 1958 Rose Bowl ring at the funeral.

“I was totally speechless. I had tears in my eyes,” Yamanaka recalled when he was presented the gift.

The other happened in 2015. Yamanaka owned an item that even Knight’s Nike money couldn’t buy.

Yamanaka had a stopwatch with Bill Hayward (of Hayward Field track fame) inscribed on the back.

“So at a football game, I showed it to Phil Knight and he says ‘I want that watch.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not for sale.’ (Knight said,) ‘You tell me the price and I’ll write you a check.’ Well, I told him, ‘It’s not for sale.’”

When Yamanaka told AD Rob Mullens the story, the AD suggested that Yamanaka reconsider.

“He (Mullens) said, he does so much for Oregon, not just athletics but the whole University, so we gotta do something.”

The watch was eventually gifted to Knight.

In an email thanking Mullens, Knight wrote “It is now one of my greatest treasures. Herb Yamanaka showed it to me at a football game … I tried to steal it from him, but he insisted it belonged to Oregon. He may have been right but I am not giving it back … At any rate it was a moving moment for me and I am forever grateful.”

With all his philanthropy, Yamanaka might be considered one of the school’s greatest ambassadors.

“Herb Yamanaka represents everything that is special about Oregon Athletics,” Mullens said in a statement to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “For decades, Herb has been a constant presence in our department and has served the Ducks in just about every capacity. More importantly, he has built relationships with generations of student-athletes, coaches, staff members, alumni and supporters. Herb is a humble, caring person with a unique ability to always put others first, and that has made an impact on this department that is difficult to measure. When you think about the people who have helped make Oregon Athletics what it is today, Herb is unquestionably high on that list. We are incredibly fortunate that he has devoted so much of his life to the Ducks, and we are even more fortunate to call him a friend and a member of our Oregon family.”

Yamanaka said he “absolutely” followed and lived by the creed that was often delivered to him by Casanova: “Don’t do anything because of wealth, rank or honor. Do it because of personal deed and character.”

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