<Begin Segment 9>

JB: Joe, could you tell us a little bit about your high school years? I mean, what, what were you thinking about for your future? And you had told us you attended a mechanical school?

JF: Mechanical drawing school, yeah.

JB: How did you get interested in that?

JF: I, I had very little idea of what I was, what I wanted to be, as they say, when I grew up. I had pretty good grades, and my teacher convinced me that I should try for the, what they called the A course at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, which is a, a technical high school in Baltimore. And they had very high standards and very -- you had to maintain a 70 grade point average and so forth. And if you graduated from the A course, you had three, four years of high school and one year of college, in effect, in four years. So you went there for four years. So with about three or four other fellows from my class, in junior high I went to this high school, and I, I liked it. And then graduated from there. We did a lot of -- [Coughs] pardon me -- we did a lot of mechanical drawing. And one of my teachers, a woman teacher, which is unusual at Poly, also taught at Maryland, Maryland Institute, and the principal of Poly, a fellow named DeHuff, William DeHuff, an outstanding educator, was the principal at, there. So somehow we decided to, my friend and I, this fellow that I told you about, Josh, he was still going, I still correspond with him and call him, he and I decided to go to Maryland Institute on Saturday mornings and learn even more about mechanical drawing. And we did that for four years. I've never used it, but it's something I enjoyed doing. I was pretty good at it.

So I managed to scrape through school. It was pretty tough. We had a, A, B, and C classes. A, A people were very smart, the B people were about average, and the C people were just not quite as smart as the B people, and I was in the B classes all the time. And I graduated, and I decided to take a year off before I was, was going, trying to, I didn't think we had enough money to go to college, I wasn't sure. So I thought I'd look around for a job after a year, so I took, I graduated in 1936, and I didn't start looking for a job until 19, early 1937. And I, I went to, I put an application in a lot of different places. And one day I got a notice to come to a department store in Baltimore. It was, it was probably the second, second-best department store in Baltimore, named Hutzler's. And I went there, and I was a stock boy for one day, and that night my uncle who worked on the newspaper called and told me that there was an opening in the library at the newspaper. Did I want to have that for a summer job? He could probably arrange it because he was a good friend of the librarian, this Ms. Deutsch that I mentioned earlier. So I went down there and I really liked her immensely, and I liked my Uncle Tony, who was the artist. So between the two of them, why, I got this job. And I never did go back to my career in retailing. So I don't know what would have happened there. But at any rate, that was Hearst Newspaper, and I was with Hearst for the next fifty-four years. It's as simple as that.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.