<Begin Segment 43>

LH: Well, you were successful in getting your degree eventually. What did you do then after you got the degree at the UW?

FG: I got a position down in American Samoa as a territorial librarian, and I took the kids and the three of us went down and we lived in Samoa for three years.

LH: So what was that like? I mean, complete change of venue and your life for three years.

FG: Interesting. It was very different. It was very interesting because there were different culture and completely different place and the weather is different and just everything was so different. No matter where you go, that you have, there are difficulties, but I think in the long run I think it was very interesting. I think it was very interesting. I still don't know, I still don't know how my kids think, what my kids think about it. But it was, for me it was part of my life that I'm glad I had. And everything, a lot of things that, a lot of things that were associated with my career to me are plus. I'm not sure that they were plus for other people, like I'm not sure they were pluses for my children, but they were for me, which is kind of selfish, I guess. But I did a lot of traveling with the job, with the work. What I did was when I graduated from the library school, I decided not to go into libraries per se, but I wanted to become an information specialist. This was early on. This was before computers were really, really there. I think there is a position or a career called information specialist now. I made it up. For me, I made it up. I thought I don't want to be a librarian, I'm going to work with information. I want to work with information dissemination and what do I call that? Well, it's information specialist. That's what my professor said, I said okay, fine. So then I go looking for a job. They say, "What are you?" "Well," I say, "I'm an information specialist." "Well, what do you specialize in?" "Information." [Laughs] "Well, what kind of information ?" "Well, what kind of information do you have?" It went around and around. It was really funny, but, yeah, I know my, after I went back to library school they asked me, my professor asked me if I would come and talk to the library school, his library school class, to tell them how I got into this, and I thought I can't. I don't know how. [Laughs] I said I don't think I'm up to it, but it was one of those things.

So consequently with that type of attitude and title, then I got into a lot of very interesting situations, like I ended up working with fisheries information, and I got to do translating and interpreting. I translated material from Washington D.C. and then I also in between jobs -- see, I had a hard time finding jobs -- but in-between jobs and then I did, some of the assignments I got were like taking officials and the fisheries people in the fisheries field to Japan and going to conferences and then helping interpret. And it was kind of important to have a background in the material you were interpreting especially because if it was sensitive, politically sensitive. And so it was a real learning experience. It was very interesting. I met a lot of interesting people and so I traveled quite a bit. And then my swan song, the last assignment I got was I went to, it was with the State Department and I went to Africa. And I spent four months there doing a feasibility study on, it's interesting, on fisheries in Africa. And so I got to travel in all of southern Africa including South Africa, but then there is nine other countries in that --

LH: And what year was this that you did this?

FG: 1987.

LH: So this was just within the last ten years that you went there. And this is still when Africa, South Africa, was still under apartheid rule.

FG: Yes. Yes. And there was a lot of -- and oh, yeah and then I was in Mozambique and Angola when and it was under martial law, martial rule. Yeah. You could hear the guns in the background, [Laughs] really interesting. I feel very, very fortunate though. I don't know. I don't know how I got to do the things I got to do, but I was glad I did it.

<End Segment 43> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.