{"id":330940,"date":"2020-10-05T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2020-10-04T20:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=330940"},"modified":"2020-10-05T06:00:14","modified_gmt":"2020-10-04T20:00:14","slug":"uncle-dave-you-cannot-go-forward-without-looking-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/uncle-dave-you-cannot-go-forward-without-looking-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Dave: You cannot go forward without looking back"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cYou cannot go forward without looking back,\u201d says David Sablan Sr. (Lindsay Nash)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Yeh-Yeh series shares rich stories and oral traditions of Saipan. The name is inspired by Refaluwasch elder Lino Olapai\u2019s childhood memory of being told to say \u201cyehyeh\u201d as the elders told stories. Once it was quiet, the elders knew the children were asleep. <\/em><\/p>\n

Look to the soil.<\/p>\n

So says distinguished Saipan businessman David Sablan Sr. as he brainstorms ideas on how to rescue Saipan\u2019s economy during these troubled times. <\/p>\n

Sitting at a table at the Terrace Cafe of the Fiesta Resort and Spa Saipan, Sablan wears a tan Hawaiian shirt, a gold Rotary Club pin shining on his lapel. At age 88, he is as sharp as the ballpoint pen clipped to his front pocket.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should go back to the soil and let the government help those who would like to go back to agriculture,\u201d says Sablan, who has fond memories of his own family farm that held acres of \u00e1tes, sweet sop, that filled his belly on long weekends.<\/p>\n

Uncle Dave, as he\u2019s warmly known, frequently pauses mid-story to address anyone who walks past. He knows everyone. This was, after all, his hotel.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey there, sir!\u201d He calls and waves to a chef who walks past. Uncle Dave\u2019s smile is magnanimous across his face. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been outwardly,\u201d he says, before hopping back into the re-hashing of his storied life\u2014a remarkable chronicle of business and development accolades across Micronesia. <\/p>\n

Sablan can easily be credited for a huge swath of Saipan\u2019s economic development, which includes 28 years as the head of the island\u2019s Atkins Kroll branch, his work as the chairman of the Marianas Tourist Authority, his founding of Tasi Tours and his business acumen that helped usher in this exact hotel where he now sits as part of the route war between Continental and Pan-Am Airlines.<\/p>\n

David Sablan Sr., known as \u201cUncle Dave,\u201d shares his stories from the past and ideas for the future. (Lindsay Nash)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sablan can name every person who helped him along the way, starting with his father, Elias P. Sablan, the first elected mayor of Saipan, and continuing down a long list of people who gave him room and board, provided a chance to learn something new, or ushered him along to the next opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew nothing about nothing,\u201d Sablan says, laughing as he remembers leaving Saipan for the first time for Guam at age 15\u2014when his father \u201ckicked him off the island\u201d to get an education.<\/p>\n

\u201cI slept on a piece of plywood on a kitchen floor,\u201d he said of his first years in Guam. <\/p>\n

At another homestay, while he attended high school, he had to wake up at 4am to collect coconuts and feed the pigs. \u201cWhen the others awoke, it was my job to go to all the rooms and empty the bedpans. I was able to subsist this way.\u201d<\/p>\n

He went from one opportunity to the next, learning what he could, doing what he could. <\/p>\n

Sablan graduated from George Washington High School, got married, and entered the world of Atkins Kroll in Guam, the oldest American company on island that had sold Micronesian copra to the world market since before the war. <\/p>\n

Every opportunity was another chance for this part-Carolinian, part-Chamorro boy who once slept on a kitchen floor to transform the islands into an economic center that could sustain itself, provide for its people and share its resources with the world. <\/p>\n

And now, retired but very much in tune to the island\u2019s economy, Sablan brainstorms around the idea for the government to provide farmers with funds to once again cultivate the land. <\/p>\n

He remembers when this exact thing happened in the 1950s, when the Navy cleared the tangan-tangan trees for any farmer who wanted to cultivate their land, and the food production was sold to commissaries in Guam. He had helped his father with the original agricultural program.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou cannot keep going forward without looking back,\u201d Sablan says. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy advice would be to go back and look at what it was before and what you, as a new generation, can duplicate or make changes to, so the economic situation will change,\u201d Sablan said. \u201cWe must cooperate with each other as much as possible, utilize the knowledge that we have so we can move forward economically, educationally, so we can live happily together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nYeh-Yeh
\nLindsay Nash (Special to the Saipan Tribune)<\/strong>
\nLindsay Nash is a writer and photographer who lives on Saipan. She is a member of the Marianas Writers\u2019 Movement and is currently writing a novel about 20th century Saipan. Email her at lindsayinsaipan@gmail.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Yeh-Yeh series shares rich stories and oral traditions of Saipan. The name is inspired…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":330943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}