“It has always been my theory that naturally, ‘As the Twig is bent, so the tree is inclined,’ but in nearly every person’s life, if they’ve lived a full life and moved around and changed, that it’s divided up into the childhood and whatever those influences were–and that includes the education they got.”
“And then, all of a sudden, school is all finished and that was just preparation. And the next thing is–what do you do with what you have? What do you do with what you are?”
“And from there on, the developments which take place may come from you, but oh, how they’re influenced by the slings and arrows of outrageous and wonderful fortune. And luck, luck, luck – if you don’t have that, no matter how good you are, you can go down into failure.”
“On the other hand, as Iacocca showed, if you have the luck with you, all of a sudden you’re the greatest person in the world.”
“But you must have, as you know – you’ve seen it in your own life – you must have the ability to be able to utilize whatever your capacities are and to help that luck.”
“The tide taken at full, and so forth, you can go out to sea and your ship goes right ahead. So that you have to have all of the aspects; ability, integrity and luck in order to succeed in any area.” (Martin Pence; Watumull Foundation)
“My father was a farmer in Kansas. His father came from Indiana in the 1860s to Kansas to homestead 160 acres. At that time a person who had 160 acres could live and raise a family on it”.
“I remember reading, ‘If you only go through high school, your increased pay will be so much, and if you go through college, you’ll be able to earn so much more.’ Imagine. I remember seeing that tacked up in the old post office in the little old town of Sterling, Kansas – population then 2,000; population today 2,200.”
As a young farm boy in Kansas Martin Pence decided he would be an attorney. “I always went down that road. And then – so through with school – take the bar in 1928 in California – passed the bar and I’m a lawyer.” He started working in San Francisco.
“And just because luck – I had a friend in one of the insurance company’s claims departments that the Home Insurance Company reinsured their insurance through, and he calls me up there in June, 1930 and says, ‘Do you want to go to Hawaii?’ And I said, ‘Oh sure, when do we start?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘seriously, the president of this company’s down looking for someone. Come on over and meet him.’”
“About three weeks later, my friend there called me up and said that Clark wanted to see me again. This time he said, ‘I’ve interviewed fifty-four other persons, and here I make you this offer.’ Well, this offer was $225 a month plus a one-year contract and a round trip ticket to Hawaii.”
“[T]hat was an offer you couldn’t refuse … I hesitated though … because in San Francisco I had a lot of contacts. But then what’s a year in the life of a young man aged twenty-five? So I accepted.”
“I got off the Malolo (August 6, 1930) and we were going out this old road … I remember looking up at the greenery of these hills in August – there was something about the blue of the sky and the white fleecy clouds, the air and all – and saying, ‘I’m never going to leave here.’ And that was final. I knew that I was never going to leave here. So it came to pass.”
“It was during 1931 that I met my first wife. She was a student at the University of Hawaii. At that time I think she was a senior. I remember her well because the first time I met her I said, ‘This girl’s dangerous – she’s too damn marriageable.’”
“She was the one woman I knew who was smarter than I was. And she was. But we dated off and on for eight years. Lucy Elizabeth Powell. An only child. … I married Lucy [Lu] Elizabeth Powell, in 1938, November 19.”
“I found that I did have an aptitude for trial work and I found that a lot of people on the [Big] Island over there heard about me as a lawyer, but I wanted more exposure. The reason I went over there was because, very frankly, they had such wonderful hunting, one of the reasons.”
“But I wanted more exposure as a lawyer. So I decided in 1938 that I would run for office. I debated at first as to what office I would run for. House of Representatives? No, it would have to be county attorney because that was my field.”
“I won. … it paid $4,400 a year, but you were allowed to take private practice. And so one always has to have breaks and I got some breaks – publicity. I used to say my business was the Woolworth Five and Ten – meaning it was of the ordinary people with low income”.
“The people had problems. I had the knack that I could talk to any race, on any problem, and so forth, and they didn’t go broke when they came in to see me. And the result was that I steadily built up a practice of little people. That’s really what it was.”
Later, “Judge Metzger immediately told me that I ought to become the circuit judge of the Third Circuit over there. It paid, I think, about $9,000 a year and with private practice I was making more than that as county attorney. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be a circuit judge.”
“ I really didn’t feel that I wanted to become a circuit judge, but Metzger knew me and knew where to touch and he said, ‘Martin, you have to take it. It would make your father so proud.’ My father back there in Kansas, in his seventies, and I knew it would. So I said, ‘All right.’”
“[I]t came to pass that in October of 1945 I received a certificate from Washington, DC that said, ‘In view of and so forth, relying upon the honesty, et cetera, I have here appointed Martin Pence a United States Circuit Judge, Third Circuit, Territory of Hawaii.’ Now in one sense I was a United States circuit judge, but actually it should have been just simply circuit judge”.
Unfortunately, the pay of the circuit judge didn’t move an inch, $9,000. And as time went on I grew poorer and poorer because prices went higher and higher. At that time the appointment was for four years, but my four years came along and there was no action out of Washington, so I decided I was through.”
“So I wrote to the president saying that I wished to resign as soon as someone was appointed to take over. That was in March and I heard nothing, not even an answer back. So in April I wrote that I’m resigning on June 30, 1950. And so I resigned and went into private practice back in Hilo.”
“And then John Ushijima … came back from Georgetown and I took him in as an associate first, and eventually made him a partner. Then Roy Nakamoto came back from Harvard and I made him an associate because business was just booming all the time. I wound up with six secretaries instead of one or two”.
Then, “Hawaii had become a state … So it happened that on June 13, 1961, I got a call from Washington, DC, an attorney friend of mine there, saying, ‘Penny, your friend McLaughlin has just been notified this morning that he is not going to be appointed to be United States district judge.’”
“’He’s out. There are only three names now being considered by the Department of Justice; John Wiig; Bert Kobayashi, then attorney general of Hawaii; and Martin Pence.’”
“It wasn’t until the following March when I was at the school for judges at Monterey – the second school that they had for federal judges – now every year when a new batch of judges comes in they have a school for them- but that was the second time it was tried – educating you on the problems of handling federal cases the best way”.
“So I [became] a United States district judge. I had then to shift to Honolulu. Lu and I had built a house in 1955. It cost us a heck of a lot more than that first house and here it was 1961 and we had to give it up. We’d built it especially for us.”
“I hated to leave Hilo. I had twenty-five years – my roots – I could say in all sincerity that there was no one on the Island of any mature age who didn’t know me.”
Pence, “married [Eleanor Talcott Fisher, “Her mother had been a Wilcox, a niece of George Wilcox, famous of Kauai”] on April 12, 1975, not quite a year and a half after Lu died.”
Judge Pence was a hunter. “I loved, always having loved, still do love, not only sheep hunting, but bird hunting in the fall, and Parker Ranch had great areas over there”.
Several decades ago, I had the opportunity to go bird hunting with Judge Pence on Parker Ranch land in Kohala, with the Parker Ranch Business Manager. Martin Pence died May 29, 2000. (All here is from an oral history interview with Martin Pence through the Watumull Foundation.)
