<Begin Segment 36>

AI: Do you think that your father or your mother -- again, before the war started -- gave you a sense that really you could do whatever you wanted to? That you could achieve pretty much whatever you wanted? Or was there also, maybe at the same time, some sense of limitation of any sort? Because now especially for the two of you, you were a little older, you're in high school, it's a time when you're starting to think ahead to your later, to your adult years, kind of having some hopes and dreams of what you might become.

MY: We kind of talked about that, because we went to Lordsburg, we, when Dad was talking about, "What are you going to do?"

TY: Yeah.

MY: And then I said I was going to major in English, and he said, "English? What are you going to do with that? You have to prepare for a career." And I remember Tosh and I -- and he kept going on and on about getting an education, and doing this and that. And I remember you and I kind of looking at each other and saying, "Gosh, does he get any news in this place?" This is in Lordsburg, New Mexico, when we went to visit him. We thought, "You must be totally isolated from their, from the rest of the world. I mean, does he know there's a war on? It was just kind of, it was a sort of a -- but Dad was kind of a nervous energy, too. I mean, he was nervous about seeing us.

TY: Well, he was doing a lot of small talk in the beginning.

MY: He was kind of on a roll, talking, chattering, chattering.

TY: Yeah, small, very small talk, and I think it's just that he was trying to put us at ease, not to worry about him, I guess implying not to worry about him, but in the process he was so nervous about it that it worked, I think it backfired. It made me feel a little bit --

MY: Well, he was saying, "When I was in college," da-da-da, "I was doing this and that," and then he was telling us that he was, there were some German, German and Italian sailors who were picked up at sea who were in the, POWs in that camp. And he said that he was translating for the Germans.

TY: That he even wrote letters for them.

MY: Yeah. Well, he wrote letters for the American soldiers who were guards there.

TY: Oh that's right, yeah.

MY: Because they didn't, they were illiterate --

TY: Some of them were illiterate --

MY: -- and they wanted to write letters to their families, 'cause they were from the South. And he said, "So I write letters, English letters for them to send to their mother or something, 'cause they didn't know how to write." But then he was also telling us, when he was asking us about what my plans were for college, that, "Well, I took German in college, and we have some German sailors here, and I've been conversing with them. See, I took German in college, and so it came very useful. And even here," so he was talking, bragging -- he used to, he was kind of a braggart anyway -- [laughs] -- but he was going on and on about how useful it would be to get a college education, but you have to prepare. I mean, English didn't seem like a very useful thing to him at that point. Although he encouraged me to take English when I was in high school. And he gave me books of poetry and things like that. But in camp he just decided that --

TY: It wasn't very practical.

MY: Yeah, that I had to go to medical school, or become a doctor.

AI: But prior to that point, before, before the camp and the worries of the war and that type of thing, did you pretty much have a sense that you were all going to go to college? You were all going to do some kind of --

MY: Always.

AI: -- have some kind of work life that --

TY: Well, I think we, we were discussing this last night, that we sort of -- he never specifically said, "You have to go to college." We just assumed that we were going to go. There was no question about not going. So the question never came up. And we just, it was just automatically --

MY: Just one of those things that we thought we would do.

TY: Yeah, we just automatically assumed that we'd be going to college. So that's the way we geared our college-prep courses in high school, too. It was, everything was geared towards going to school -- going to college. So I don't remember Dad ever asking me, "Are you really seriously thinking about going to college?"

MY: Yeah, I don't either. But I do remember, I went to college during the war years. And, because monumental obstacles. I couldn't get in because I was an "enemy alien" and so forth. And then once I got into college and there were all kinds of problems. And I remember a friend of mine asked me to write about my college difficulties, that I had going to college. So I sat down and started writing it, and I thought to myself, I must have been really dense. I mean, any sensible young person would have given up. I mean, said, oh well, to heck with it, and given it up. And I, and I just thought to myself, I think it was Dad's train-, kind of ingrained in us, you have to go, you have to do --

TY: Yeah, unconscious or otherwise, I think he did.

MY: And it was just something, no matter what, no matter what happened, no matter, Mike got kicked out of school, I got kicked out of the sorority house, I mean, all these different things that were happening to us during World War II, and somehow we just hung in there.

TY: Yeah.

MY: And so I thought, any sensible person might have just given up on it.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.