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AI: But this was just before that time, and here you are entering college, you're on your own. And I'm wondering at that, that first year of college, did you already have something in mind that you thought, plans for the future? Did you have an idea of what you might be doing? Did you have a purpose, like a career purpose in entering college or any particular goal in mind?

PI: Well, I actually had two, very different. When I was in high school and I was very involved in the Unitarian youth groups -- it's called Liberal Religious Youth -- some people call it "Little Radical Youth." But I wanted to be a Unitarian minister and in fact had even decided to go to a Unitarian seminary for training as a minister, Saint Lawrence Seminary in New York. But I changed my mind, I think, just before, just at the time I got to Antioch. And my idea then was that I wanted to be a public health doctor. The person who had first told me about Antioch was a friend of my family's in Cincinnati, a doctor, in fact, husband and wife who were both doctors. And they had worked with Albert Schweitzer in Africa, and they had worked in hospitals in Haiti and Burma, I think, and various places in Asia. And I was very attracted to them. And I really wanted to become a physician and work in public health. But I realized very soon that I did not have any aptitude or interest in chemistry, physics, math, the sciences that you needed in order to go to medical school. And so I then sort of changed my career plans and thought I would go into a very odd field called epidemiology, where you study diseases. You don't treat people, but you study diseases, how they begin, how they spread. It's a public health kind of thing. And in fact, Antioch is a college where the students spend three months on campus, and then the next three months, they go out and work on a job. It's called the Cooperative Education Program. Antioch is the only college in the country that requires it of every student. And it's a five-year program, so you spend alternating three-month periods working and studying.

And I had jobs, and they send you -- these are real jobs. They're not just internships, they're real jobs. My first job in Washington, D.C. was with the U.S. Public Health Service. And I was working in epidemiology. It was actually something called the Air Pollution Medical Program, studying the ways in which air pollution affected people's health to show that there was in fact a link between air pollution and illness and death. And I really enjoyed that, but also living in Washington, D.C. And that's where, even though I'd been active politically and socially at Antioch, I realized, here we are in the nation's capitol. This is where a lot of things happen. I got very interested in what was happening in Congress. This was a year where we were getting ready for a presidential election in 1960. And so I got active in a number of things in Washington, most importantly the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.