EAST LANSING - Bob Apisa was 7 years old when he left his native American Samoa for Hawaii.
One of 11 children in the family, he didn't speak English and had never seen electricity. So, the bright lights at night in Honolulu sparked a profound thought.
Apisa turned to his brother George and, in Samoan, said 'there must be hundreds and hundreds of kerosene lanterns out there.'"
"He kind of smirked and he says 'no, that's not kerosene lanterns, that's electricity,'" Apisa recalled. "So, in 1952 Thomas Edison came to my life."
A dozen years after Apisa first confronted electricity, he made the 4,000-plus mile journey to Michigan State as a scholarship football player.