Most people I know wish they could have one more conversation with a friend, a family member or a loved one who has passed.

That was expressed during a lunch among my Kaimuki High School buddies. One of them wished, and we all concurred, that our two friends — one a two-time state wrestling champion and the other a table- setting point guard on a third-place state tournament basketball team — were sitting there talking story with us.

I want to add another to my personal list, but this one was professional. I wish I had one more chance to interview one of the most interesting people I ever met — Jim Becker.

The legendary former Associated Press writer, bureau chief, war correspondent, author, lecturer and storyteller died on Feb. 7 at age 98.

I’ll tell you what I would have wanted to discuss with him later in this column — it would involve a Hawaii broadcasting icon who passed away last month at 88, Don Robbs, and the assassination of a beloved president — but I feel compelled to further discuss the depth of this man who delivered prose to millions.

I connected with Becker about 20 years ago. I considered him my personal encyclopedia. He was engaging, sharp and always willing and ready to talk story about history, probably because he was personally involved.

It seemed each time we talked — well, he talked and I listened because he was wiser and smarter — he would, by sheer force of his delivery, bring life to his book, “Saints, Sinners & Shortstops.”

His godson, Peter Brooks of Connecticut, described him best in a telephone interview while in Hawaii recently to be at Becker’s bedside, saying he was the “Forrest Gump” of journalists.

He was there for almost every transcendent event and interviewed the rich and famous.

He covered Jackie Robinson’s first MLB game in 1947, got the first picture of the Dalai Lama in Calcutta in 1959, wrote about the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis — he was on the plane that photographed Soviet freighters taking the missiles out of Cuba — in the 1960s, and was there for the Munich Olympics tragedy in 1972.

He also was in the Army during World War II and covered parts of three wars as a war correspondent for AP.

He interviewed Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana (before she married her prince actually), many great athletes, numerous dignitaries, such as the UK’s Margaret Thatcher, whom he considered the most remarkable, along with U.S. presidents.

You knew he was a high-principled journalist because he got yelled at by a president. Lyndon Baines Johnson called him a “no good stupid lying son of a b——” after Becker said he wrote the truth about the war in Vietnam.

Despite all that, what endeared him to Hawaii was his article on the 1965 Farrington football team in which he detailed the raw emotions of those players that he said “produced the most important story I ever wrote.”

Farrington’s 16-6 win over Kamehameha and his story headlined “The day the Govs won it all” reverberates in Kalihi till this day, as it changed perceptions and brought pride to the community.

But the one interview I wish I could have had with Becker was about the day the world turned. It was Nov. 22, 1963, the day of the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy in Dallas.

It was a tragedy I became fascinated with, especially with the first public release of the Abraham Zapruder film in 1975. I remember watching it during my formative years in a packed auditorium with University of Oregon students ready to rebel. (Actually, most college campuses were havens for student protest back then. Some, such as the Kent State massacre in 1970, turned tragic.) That film inflamed students and public dissent and ignited grassy knoll and other conspiracy theories.

The subject re-invigorated my interest once again not because today is President’s Day but because of what happened this past Tuesday.

The FBI conducted a new records search and found about 2,400 new documents related to the assassination. It was ordered in January by President Donald Trump, who called for the release of classified intelligence and law enforcement files about the shooting.

Alice L. George, author of “The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Political Trauma and American Memory” said in a Reuters article: “I can’t imagine any document that would convince (conspiracy theorists) that (Lee Harvey) Oswald acted alone, particularly among people who are really invested in that way of thinking. It’s going to probably leave them in the same place where they are now.”

If anything, though, I wanted to know the mood of the country back then. As a 10-year-old I found the neighborhood to be eerily quiet that day. But I wanted to know how adults processed the ordeal and how journalists kept their composure while disseminating the information.

I know the impact it had in Hawaii, thanks to an interview I had with Robbs back in February 2023, the year of the 60th anniversary of the event.

“Oh God, I remember that day so well,” Robbs said. “I was the morning news guy on KPOI at that time. Came to work on the morning of the day. My first newscast was at 6 a.m.

“The overnight guy was Dave Donnelly. He was going to UH. We would rip the wire (roll of paper with short typed paragraphs) at the time (from) the old teletype machines.”

Later, Robbs said, he “heard the bells ringing on the AP machine and they were going crazy. We went back to the teletype machine and it was all garbled.

“Finally after a few minutes (we found out) something had happened in Dallas and President Kennedy’s name was mentioned. I thought, Oh God.

“Within a short period of time, we got the message that President Kennedy had been killed. (The shooting occurred at 12:30 p.m. Friday in Dallas and the President was pronounced dead at 1 p.m., which would have been 9 a.m. in Hawaii.)

“In all the years I did broadcasting, whatever I did, I always kept my cool and stayed under control. But I lost control that morning.”

Robbs’ son, Scott, also a UH sports broadcaster, said on Thursday that his father had talked to him about that day. Scott said his dad told him “the only time he cried on the air was when Kennedy was killed.”

“It was unbelievably shocking,” Don Robbs said. “In all my years, I’ve never been through anything as shocking and sad as that day.”

He recalls going to a restaurant later in the day and people were crying.

“If I were to headline that story today I would say, ‘It was the day Hawaii cried.’”

Even the escapist world of sports couldn’t escape it.

A sold-out football game between Kamehameha and Farrington was postponed that Friday night and moved to the following Thursday on Thanksgiving Day, replacing a then-extremely popular Turkey Day doubleheader that usually involved the top four teams in the ILH.

The locally televised game saw Kamehameha’s gang-tackling, swarming defense stop the great running back Bob Apisa in a 10-8 win over the Governors.

Two years later, Becker would be in Hawaii, where he would write his epic Farrington article.

But Becker was still an AP writer back in 1963 and he did write an article on the Kennedy Assassination a month later.

Becker and a team of reporters were sent to Dallas in late December to investigate the assassination. On New Year’s Eve of 1963 and in no mood to celebrate, he decided to walk to Dealey Plaza, the site of the shooting.

He recalled that it was 11:15 p.m., a pleasant night marred by a little rain and that it was 34 degrees. He saw a car drive past the Texas School Book Depository, with two young girls placing a bouquet in the area. Then another car arrived, then another, until it was bumper to bumper. As the New Year was being celebrated elsewhere, many in Dallas paid tribute by leaving flowers and notes that numbered in the hundreds at a makeshift memorial, the kind sadly commonplace today.

He said it was perfectly spontaneous — just hundreds spending New Year’s Eve this way instead of celebrating.

He returned to the office to write and the AP cleared its wire for it.

Becker said it would be his most reprinted story.

The next day — Jan. 1, 1964 — Becker, a versatile and talented newsman, covered the Cotton Bowl, which featured No. 1 Texas against No. 2 Navy and its Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach. (Texas won 28-6.)

Don Robbs told me back in 2023 that “all the sportswriters from that time are gone except one — Jim Becker. I did the audio for his book. He has a wonderful memory.”

I told Robbs, “I’m gonna call him.”

But I never did, and now I regret missing a great opportunity.

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Reach Curtis Murayama at cmurayama@staradvertiser.com.