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AI: So it was in this setting, near Cincinnati, that you were in high school, and this school desegregation was happening in Little Rock. It was national news.

PI: Right.

AI: And you even had this prejudiced commentary by some of the other white students in your own high school. Now, what were you thinking about as this was happening? What were your own reactions to the situation in Little Rock, and were you having a conversation in your family or with friends or peers?

PI: I don't remember conversations with my family, but we must have had them, because we had a tradition in our family. It was a large family. And when we sat down for dinner we would go around the table, and everybody would say something about what they had done that day or what they were thinking about. And my father would ask us questions, sort of current events kinds of things. I do remember that. So we must have talked about that. But this was also a time, I think starting in 1956, when my father got ill. And it turned out that, he was then working in Cincinnati for the General Electric Company. He had gone back to them. And they were, the project he was working on as the chief engineer was to develop an atomic-powered airplane. And they had this project at the GE plant in Cincinnati to build an atomic-powered airplane. It never took off. It just wasn't feasible at that time. And I don't think there's ever been an atomic-powered airplane.

But at any rate, my father got ill. And in my family, we talked about many things, but we never talked about very unpleasant things, particularly people getting ill and dying. So for about two years while I was in high school and just when I went off to college, my father was progressively more and more ill, stayed home, went to the hospital. And all during that time my parents, both my father and my mother, never talked about this issue. I don't even recall learning what the problem was. I do remember once that my mother took me out in the car and -- just me -- and I think I was just about to go off to college at the time. And we drove around, and then she stopped and she said, "You know, your father is, is going to die before too long." And that was all we said. And it wasn't even an invitation for me to express feelings. Just letting me know that that was going to happen. So that whole experience, I think must have had a really significant effect on me. At the same time that I was becoming politically and socially more active and aware, I was sort of struggling with how my -- what am I going to do with this?

I think probably the most significant decision that I made was to go to Antioch College after I finished high school. Antioch is a small private college about 60 miles north of Cincinnati. It's in a little town called Yellow Springs, Ohio, which is literally the middle of nowhere surrounded by hundreds and thousands of square miles of farmland in central Ohio, corn fields mostly. But Yellow Springs is like an oasis. In fact, it originally was an oasis. It was called Yellow Springs because the natural iron springs were -- it was a health spa. It started out as, in the early nineteenth century, people would go to the Yellow Springs and sit in this hot, stinky water supposedly for their health. And a small college was started there in the 18-, early 1850s. And the first president of that college was Horace Mann. Now, Horace Mann was the founder of American public education in Massachusetts. He'd later gone on to be a congressman. He was an abolitionist. When he left Congress, he came to Antioch as the president. And Antioch was one of the very first two or three schools in the whole country to admit black students. And it was also a stop on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. So there was a tradition of social activism at Antioch, and that's what attracted me to the college. I was given a lot of advice -- 'cause I'd done well in school, in high school -- that I could go to a really good Ivy League school like Harvard, some other prestigious university. And I decided from the very beginning -- I went on a visit to Antioch, that that's where I wanted to go to school. And I started there just at the time, just a few months before my father died. And so I was away from home for the first time, and the minute I arrived at Antioch, literally, I got active in political and social things, particularly in the Civil Rights movement.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.