CNN just posted a very nice obituary on Ronald Takaki, starting with his meager beginnings in Hawaii. 

From where he came, no one could have predicted what Ronald Takaki would become. Raised in a low-income area of Oahu, Hawaii, a descendant of Japanese immigrants who toiled in sugar cane plantation fields, he cared more about surfing than schoolwork.

But the boy who earned the nickname "10-toes Takaki," a reference to when surfers hang 10 toes over the front of a long board, went on to become a legendary ethnic studies scholar.

The pioneering and beloved professor of more than 30 years at University of California, Berkeley, and prolific author who helped change how American history is written, died on May 26.

Takaki, who had boundless energy, took his own life after battling multiple sclerosis for 15 years, his son, Troy, said. He was 70.

The crushing fatigue and loss of mobility were "very hard on him," said Troy, one of Takaki's three children. "For good or bad, he was not someone who could sit around and watch 'Oprah' all day."

Takaki, rather, was someone who blazed trails. He attended the College of Wooster in Ohio, the first in his family to seek a higher education. His father died when Takaki was young, and his mother left school after the eighth grade.

In the 1960s, he earned a master's and doctorate in history from UC Berkeley, where he wrote a dissertation on slavery in America. It was during this period that he "was born intellectually and politically," he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, the year of his retirement.

The rest of the article can be found here.