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By war's end, the early distant rumbles of change had reached a thundering tempo. Servicemen who had spent their liberties on Hawaii's beaches during the war returned with their families and began to build a new life. With wage restrictions lifted. Jack Hall and the militant I.L.W.U. (current membership: 25.-ooo) surged inland. The Nisei warriors were home again, recharged, proud and ambitious. All told. Hawaii faced a new fact of life: an exploding, new middle class, one that was bound to change the old ways forever.
Sensing this, the old, established, once complacent firms of the islands reached out for new blood, some of it Oriental, but most of it from the mainland. Traveling to the mainland to find a young lawyer to take into his firm, Honolulu Attorney J. Garner Anthony interviewed a promising young Harvard law graduate named William Francis Quinn.
Private Passion. "I absolutely detest doing anything unless I do it well," says Bill Quinn. "It's almost a character flaw." And virtually from birth—in Rochester, N.Y. in 1919—he seemed to have the capabilities for doing well in a public way. He combined a friendly personality with a lilting tenor voice, a sense of theater, and Irish affection for his fellow humans. And beneath it all he had a private passion for self-improvement that left his easygoing friends in awe.
After the family moved from Rochester to St. Louis, he was to all appearances happily enrolled at Soldan High School. But he decided to switch to a different regime of study in his junior year, transferred to Jesuit-run St. Louis University High School, moved on after his graduation to St. Louis University. A big man on campus, intensely competitive, Quinn got the idea that his scholarship and outside activities (singing, theatricals) might label him something of a sissy. Characteristically, he solved that problem by entering a boxing tournament. He trained for a couple of weeks, and then, despite the fact that he was unprepared, he went into the ring, even made his way to the finals. In his final match, Light-Heavyweight (165 Ibs.) Quinn fought an athlete named Les Dudenhoeffer. Says Quinn: "He proceeded to put me on the canvas every time I got up. They finally stopped it in the second round. It was one of those things where by losing I gained.''
Searching for something more challenging than studies at the university business school, Quinn switched to liberal arts, turned to a major in philosophy, was particularly interested in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Despite warnings from his teachers that the studies were too tough, Quinn took on a special-honors section, graduated summa cum laude in 1940, and headed for Harvard Law School.
The Prophecy. Pearl Harbor interrupted his second year at law school. In 1942 the Navy gave him an ensign's commission. He married his high school sweetheart, Nancy Ellen Witbeck, and they were ordered to cushy shore duty in Chicago. But Quinn had a severe distaste for the battle of Lake Michigan, got himself a transfer, served in the South Pacific as an air-combat intelligence officer for the duration. He was discharged in 1946, just in time to catch the spring term at Harvard, was finishing up a year later when he began sifting through a sheaf of job offers from big and little law firms.