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MY: And then we, my husband had then got a job at Chicago University -- no, he got a job at Mergenthaler Linotype in New York. We were in Chicago then. And I, I was taking my master's comp exam, I was going to be taking my master's comp exam in April, I think, and so I -- and I was studying for it, so my husband went to New York and he was living at the Y for a long time, and I said well, I would take my exams before I joined him. And Jeni was a couple years old at that time. And so, and then my dad died at the end of March, a few weeks before I took my comps, and I went to take my comprehensive exam and failed. Which was kind of understandable because the subject matter for the comprehensive critical analysis part of the examination was Tennyson's -- oh, I don't even -- "In Memoriam"? You know, about the death of his friend and it just kind of goes on and on and on about the death of his friend, and I guess I just couldn't get past my recent -- I think the funeral was just over and my mother was a mess, you know, because she was just absolutely helpless since my dad was again taking care of everything. And so after I failed the exam, I just decided there was really not much point in my hanging around in Chicago, so I moved to New York to join Yosh there.

And we lived in an apartment in Long Island city in New York, and I have these little kind of chronology here. I lost my second child. I had another miscarriage that year, I guess all the turmoil was a little bit too much, in 1953. And then in 1954 Yosh got a job in Evanston. So he was going back to Chicago, you know, but this is during the period when in order to be upwardly mobile, the upward mobility people who were working in corporate America had to change jobs about every two or three -- I don't know if this is true now, but, and going back and forth. So my husband said that actually he -- Bell & Howell sought him out where he was working at Mergenthaler, because I think he had written a couple papers or something. So they offered him a job to work in the Research & Development Committee, in development. They wanted his particular expertise in chemistry. So he said, well, and I said, "Well, I'm not going to move back to Chicago. I'm going to stay here. I love New York," because I got my undergraduate degree in New York. I didn't really care very much for Chicago and so -- as a city, to live in. So I told him, "Well, if you want this job, you could commute." Of course I was kind of half-joking, but before he, he went to apply for the job. So he went to Evanston to apply for the job and during the -- and he just thought they would say well, "Don't call us, we'll call you." And then they offered him the job on the spot. So he said, "Well, I have to go home and ask my wife," -- [laughs] -- "because she refuses to move to Chicago and therefore, I might have to commute from New York to Chicago." They asked him how, and that he would take the job on condition that they'd pay for his transportation. And so they said they would do that.

And so he took the job, he moved into the Y, like before when he was in New York, in Brooklyn, he was living in the Y while I was... So all this time we were always living, people would often ask at our 50th anniversary, "How did you stay married so long?" And I'm going, well, as a matter of fact -- [laughs] -- maybe because we always lived apart, so much of the time. But anyway, he came home on a Friday night to New York from Chicago. And then he, and then because of the time change he was able to take the first flight out on Monday morning and get to Chicago, you know, in time to get to work. The only problem with that during the winter months -- I think he did that for about a year and a half -- during the winter months, when the second winter was coming along, it was just getting to be a little bit much because if you know Chicago weather, and New York weather, and I was, and if my mother hadn't been living with me, I could not have left my children at home to go to the airport and sit there for hours waiting for his plane to come in and he was getting snowed in or iced in or whatever. Chicago was so cold during the winter, and the flights were always being canceled and so on. So that was the only part of it that was kind of hard. And I suppose there was a lot of wear and tear on him, but I really didn't care very much about that. I just felt, you know, I just was going to stay in New York. And then one day he came home and he said, "You know, I got... the Research & Development department at Bell & Howell, they're going to, they bought out this company in Pasadena, California, and they're moving the whole department to California." And he said, you know, "California's a little bit far to commute to from New York." [Laughs] So I had to kind of say, "Oh, okay. Guess we'll have to move," so we moved. And so we went to New York, to New York City.

It says here that I passed, that I took my comprehensive, third comprehensive examination which, on Alfred North Whitehead. Oh, I was in, let's see, I was in New York, Yosh was in Chicago and I was studying for my comps and the subject at that time was Alfred North Whitehead, who is a philosopher or scientist or something. He wrote a book called The Philosophy of Modern Science [Ed. note: Narrator is referring to Science and the Modern World] or something like that. There's a whole paragraph on the quantum theory. I have no idea why an English major, that book was chosen, you know. I didn't understand the quantum theory and they were using the quantum theory as a metaphor, you know, for some literary works and so forth. If you didn't understand the theory, you know, how are you going to be able to understand what the metaphor, how to do the comparison in the metaphor? So we spent, I don't know, hundreds of dollars worth of long distance phone calls. My husband bought a copy of the book -- [laughs] -- in Chicago, studied the book and we were on the phone for hours and he was trying to explain the quantum theory to me. And I went to take my exam and I passed it. And so my husband said, "Gosh, that was the hardest exam I never took." [Laughs] And I said, "Well, you passed." So then after that, after I got my... I did take the exam through a proxy. I happened to know a professor, a former professor I had at NYU who was living in New York and I asked her if she would be my proxy to administer the test to me. So she, I went to her house and took the exam and I finished, got my master's degree. And then we --

AI: That must have been a sense of accomplishment and completion there.

MY: Well, yeah, that was kind of one unfinished thing that hangs over your head, you know. Gosh, you know, my husband was the one who kept pushing me. It's just this one little thing, it wasn't even a whole exam, it was only a third of the comps that I didn't pass, and he said, "You just have to keep at it," and so I, and then they told me that I could take the test in absentia and so that I didn't have to go to Chicago to do it. So it seemed like a very easy way to do that. The only thing is that we were in different places and he had to explain the quantum theory to me on the telephone. [Laughs]

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.