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MY: So I went to the hospital, it took a long time to get -- got x-rays and tested and so forth, and the outcome of that was that they told me I had terminal emphysema. And that perhaps it might be another year or... and the doctor was very vague, he said well, you know, "How long do I have?" "Maybe a year, but it's very unpredictable, it's a progressive condition, but sometimes it doesn't progress at all and sometimes it progresses very rapidly. So maybe you might have a year, maybe ten years, maybe longer." And in the meantime Yosh bought a, air filter and built for the bedroom. And we considered moving out of Sierra Madre because it was getting very, very smoggy and we thought that had precipitated this condition and so we thought maybe we'd move out to Palm Springs area, the resort area out there, where the air was clearer. And so I remember taking all the kids, driving out to the desert. Because they were selling land at that time. Palm Springs hadn't quite developed into anything. If we had bought some land out there, we might have been, become very rich -- [laughs] -- by now, but we took the kids out there and at that time Palm Springs and that whole area around it, we met some, we took some picnic lunch and we were eating a picnic lunch in this little park, and we met some kids out there, and their parents had moved out there because their father got sick or something, and it was kind of the sanitarium of people who were going, moved out there for health reasons, or one or the other. And so we came home and thought about it and it just didn't seem to... it was a very unattractive option. You know, what are we going to do out there, what are we going to do about schools or the children and so forth.

So we came back, I had a series of treatments and I got a little better. I had to take an oxygen tank around with me all the time but I just thought to myself, you know, I was thinking that, what do I do with my education? I was going to wait for the children to be grown enough, for Hedi to graduate from high school, to do something with my life, my own life. And I just thought, well, "I might not have a chance to do that. Maybe this is a chance to do it." So I kind of looked around to see if there was something that might keep my mind occupied, for one thing, and so I decided to take a course at Cal State (Los Angeles) which was kind of a half an hour commute from Sierra Madre. I looked at their catalog and I wasn't -- I kind of latched onto this course that was called Community College Teaching. And I had never thought about teaching before in my whole life, but it's like a, maybe an option. And so I was taking that course, and then my kids were going to Ascension, and I thought well, you know, maybe I should practice -- I was reading about the community, it was a whole history of the community colleges and why it was formed, and it wasn't very helpful. But so I thought I'd kind of test my skill at teaching. So I, and I was complaining to the headmaster at the school who was a priest of the church that the children should have more poetry and mythology in the classroom. So he said, "Why don't you teach it, why don't you teach it to the kids?" So I said, "Well, okay." So I started to go to the Ascension Church to teach the little children poetry and mythology, which was kind of fun. And then I started sending out resumes, and in the meantime the professor that I had at Cal State (Los Angeles) called me and she said that she knew of this job opening at Fullerton College. So I thought well, maybe I'll just go down there and see what it's all about. I had no idea how far it was, because I didn't have any sense of geography. It was about an hour away from Sierra Madre to Orange County, way down in Fullerton. I drove down there and then I got the job right away. Much to my dismay, you know. [Laughs] And I thought, "Oh my gosh, you know, I have a job, what am I going to do with it?" I went to the library and got a lot of books on educational psychology. Really, one is totally unprepared for teaching in a -- I was not eligible to teach in elementary school or high school, because I didn't have credentials for teaching those, the lower grades. But here I was eligible to teach to the community college students, and I didn't know a single thing about teaching. It was kind of disgraceful. So I was teaching, actually the reason why I got this job so quickly, I found later, I found out later, was that one of the teachers, regular teachers there, had decided to take a leave of absence because he wanted to go somewhere for a year and he let the school know very suddenly at the last minute and didn't give them too much time to recruit for -- and I just happened to come along, and so I got hired rather accidentally. So, and then the head of, the chair of the department turned out to be a graduate of the University of Chicago, just around the same time that I went to graduate school. I didn't know him. It was a small class but we couldn't figure out exactly why we missed each other. But he took the same kind of, you know, same courses so we really hit it off. And I taught there for about three years and then one day he called me in and I was still going to the hospital to get my lungs cleared out, I still was in this mindset of, I had to prepare my children, so I started writing a lot -- I was teaching, I was writing. Then I thought, you know, I have to leave something visual, tangible, for my kids to remember me by. So I took up sculpting, which was kind of -- I have no idea where my mind was going. I just thought, I thought sculpting was kind of a neat activity to get your hands on clay or whatever, and you mold things. So I started sculpting my younger, Hedi's head. I still have it in the garage someplace. And this sculptor that I had, the teacher, lived in Pasadena and he lived in this huge estate-type thing, was a outdoor sculptor. He made friezes and things like that. He was just, and he was about eighty years old and was just really a very interesting person. So I started taking sculpting from him.

I was teaching, I was thinking that I should write because my children would not remember me and I was thinking, "Well, Jeni is twelve, Stephen is almost six, six plus, maybe seven; my husband's biological father died when he was six years old and he barely remembers his father. The other two kids are not going to remember me," so I thought it was important for me to start writing, to tell them who I was, and so I wrote quite a few things at that time. I went to poetry workshops that were being conducted in the neighborhood and then around (1969), I think around that time -- and then the smog continued to get worse in Sierra Madre, and so I was working but when I got home I just had to hole myself up in the bedroom with the air filter. I had to go to the hospital, you know, it was just one of those things. My children remember me at that period as a person who was always in bed. Because I just came home exhausted from work, and my mother was, my mother -- I hadn't told my mother what was wrong with me. She would have freaked out, so I told her that I was just tired from working, and so she was very, she was very cooperative. She was used to taking care of me all the time. So we, at one point I decided to move to... we just decided, the allergies, actually my lung specialist, the allergist told me that perhaps I should get out of Sierra Madre. But he said, "Don't sell your house yet, try out some neighborhoods and see what places are good for your lungs," and so I got a house near the beach in Huntington Beach. I took my younger kids and put them in the schools there, and I went to work and my husband and my mother stayed up in Sierra Madre. So we were separated again, you know, we were living in two different places, and my kids -- then I think that when they were in junior high, we did, at one point, did move back. Yosh decided that he would retire, that this kind of life was, and living in Sierra Madre was just not good, and that we should move to a better climate, a better air quality. And so he had been wanting to retire, to start his own company for a long time. To start a -- he wanted to invent, he had a lot of ideas for inventions, but he knew that he couldn't invent, he couldn't publish them while he was working for Bell & Howell because as a member of the Research & Development department, anything that he thinks up, it would become the property of Bell & Howell. So that was kind of a good excuse for him to quit his job, for us to move out of the area. So we moved to where we are right now in Irvine. And then around that time I found out that I was misdiagnosed.

AI: That was about 1969 or 1970?

MY: '70, yeah, 1970, 1971.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.