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AI: Before we go there, I wanted to just mention that you had said earlier how sick your father was, how ill he was. And I was wondering if he, if either he or your mother had said anything to you about your plans for the future or influenced you in any way?

PI: It's interesting because my, my dad never did. He was an engineer, very good at science. I, all the way through high school, struggled with the things that he was really good at. But I also had things that I was, excelled at -- writing, speaking, social sciences, the kinds of things that I'm still doing fifty years later. And he always encouraged me, and my mother did too, just to pursue what I wanted, to do what interested me. And if it wasn't the same as him, that was fine. I never recall having a specific conversation sitting down, you know like, "Well, son, what are you planning to do with your life?" This was a period, of course, that was very difficult for my whole family, with my father being ill. But I do recall that he was very excited about my going to Antioch. And I felt very sad that he couldn't come visit the first few months that I was there, because he was very ill at home and in the hospital. And I do recall the time that he died. It was my -- it was in January of 1959, my first year at Antioch. And there was a memorial service for him in Cincinnati at the Unitarian Church. There was no funeral, but this memorial service was very meaningful to me because a lot of people that I had not known or knew very little, friends of my father, people he worked with, got up and spoke about him. And he played classical music in a little group, and people he'd played with -- he was a clarinet player -- played his favorite music like Schubert's Trout Quintet and things and it was just... and spoke about him in ways that I had never known of his influence on other people. And the main thing I remember from that is how much he cared for the people he worked with and who worked for him, and how the tradition of engineers being sort of cold, hard people, following the rules. My father never followed the rules, and he made it very clear to us in, in indirect ways, all the kids in our family, you, you have to obey your inner rules. You shouldn't hurt other people. And there's a real role for rules, for laws, for behavior, following those rules. But there are higher rules. And I think a lot of that came out of the Unitarian philosophy, that there are higher rules than just man-made rules, the whole tradition of civil disobedience, going all the way back to Thoreau and the abolitionists. So that was sort of a thread that came through my whole life, even though it didn't, wasn't stated explicitly.

AI: So that was part of your father's legacy to you?

PI: Yeah. In a way that I never consciously realized until many years later. Now, my mother, her impact -- my mother grew up and lived for most of her life a very normal, middle-class housewife and mother. She had seven children, a big house to run, and from all appearances -- garden club, coffees with the ladies, this kind of thing -- she looked on the outside like your typical house-and-garden mother. But there was something inside that never came out until after my father died, a very different side of her. She was a poet. She had been writing poetry for years and never showed it to anybody because she didn't think my father would approve. I don't know if he would have or not. But a very creative, free-spirited kind of person that had been inside this middle-class life all the time until my father died. In fact, right after he died, she decided that she would leave Cincinnati and go someplace totally different. She moved to Exeter, New Hampshire, with six -- I was in college -- but six kids with her, hardly any money, not much of a pension from General Electric. But she was determined to raise her kids and send them to good schools. That's why she moved to Exeter -- sort of ironic -- Phillips Exeter Academy, it's a great private school. We lived two blocks from the academy, none of my brothers and sisters went to Exeter Academy. Some of them went to Quaker boarding schools and various other, the Emma Willard School. One my sisters went to North Field School for Girls. But my mother did everything possible to get all the younger kids through school and go to good schools. And I remember the, the very minute that my youngest brother, Dean, graduated from high school. My mother called a family meeting. I was then living in Boston. We all gathered, and she said, "Well, I have a surprise. I'm moving to Greece." And none of us had the slightest inkling, and she did. She sold her house and moved to a little island in Greece and stayed there for ten years. And all that time she was writing poetry and being sort of a Gertrude Stein character.

AI: So, some insight into your mother, as well.

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