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MY: And so I started working for Ada Gory as assistant cashier, and she taught me all the things that I knew. And so I was working there and then in the fall I started -- in the spring, I guess, I started school. I was accepted to University of Cincinnati. Oh, she sent me to, I told her my -- I think it was she sent me to the Dean of Women. They used to have Dean of Women and Dean of Men at these universities. And then the Dean of Women talked to me and she said, told me, "Well, why don't you apply for (classes)?" For, why don't you apply to enroll -- and it's getting really late for the next semester. You'd better do it right away, and she brought me the application and told me to fill it out. And I didn't have the courage, and I didn't have the nerve to tell her, "Well, I'm not a citizen and I've been rejected from every university in the country." I don't even know whether I'm... you know, whether I'm -- I mean, I had a lot of doubts about it, but obviously she was being very kind. And so I didn't, I was too afraid to tell her, you know, that maybe I won't get in anyway, but I filled out the application anyway and I gave it to her, and apparently something... I did get in. So I started school, I think, in mid-semester, and in mid-year. And so that's how I got into University of Cincinnati.

So I was there barely into my sophomore year -- oh, and then I was staying at the hostel, but then at the same time -- oh, I know what happened. I was staying at the hostel, I told Ada that I was living at the hostel, and she said, "Look, there's a dormitory on this campus." Or, there's a sorority house. I guess I stayed at the sorority house. I went to the sorority house to -- it was a Greek sorority house. The women had rooms renting on the second and third floors. So I think it was the second floor. So I went to see them and then I had two roommates who were not part of the sorority. And I guess that must have been before, yeah, that was before Christmas. I guess I must have enrolled rather late because I went home with my roommates to, for Christmas. They lived in this very small town in a place called Tiffin, Ohio, I think. And they had cars, both of them were married and their husbands were overseas, and they were going to school. And they invited me to their home in Tiffin, Ohio, so I went and we had, I had a lovely time with their family and spent Christmas with them. Then when we went back to the sorority house, we were met by a group of sorority sisters on the walk and they said, "You can't come in here, you can't come back." And then I looked on the porch and I noticed that all my belongings were on the porch. You know, my suitcase and then a lot of lamps and things like that were kind of loosely... and they said that somebody else had moved into my room. And so Becky got -- the two women that I was with, their names were Miriam and Becky. Just thinking -- I just remember they said, they got very angry and they said, "What do you mean?" And they said, "Well, we're not talking about you, just her," you know. And so they said, so they couldn't, we couldn't figure -- of course, we didn't know what was going on and they started to argue. And then one of the sorority sisters, this young, young woman, she just burst into tears and she said, "It's not us, you know, it's our -- it's the alumni, you know, our sorority sisters alumni who are advisors. They told, when they found out that, you know, she -- that Mitsuye was living in this, they said that we couldn't have a Japanese living in our house. And that we had to, um, to um, ask her to leave." And so then they got very angry and they said, "Well, if she has to leave, then we're going to leave, too." And, which was quite noble, you know, of them. And then Miriam said that she had an aunt who has an apartment upstairs from her garage that was vacant. And so she said, "Well, that's where we will go." And so we just packed her car up and whatever that we could carry, among her, their stuff, because they had more than I did. I didn't have very many things, you know. In the camp I had only two suitcases, and I packed the, I had only two suitcases of belongings. So we moved out, all of us, and -- but Miriam and Becky both had cars and their aunt lived in the suburbs. I don't really quite remember where it was, but it was a little distance from the campus, you know, the dormitory was right across the street and you could walk, you know, to -- not the dormitory, the sorority house was right, right across the street. So it was, I think it was just only a few weeks, I -- you know, Miriam took me to school and then she'd have to wait for me to finish work, because my hours were quite long since I was working in the cafeteria part-time after the classes were over. And it was such an imposition to them as it was, so I went back to the Dean of Women, because I recognized that she was quite a good friend, and told her, asked her if there was a place I could live in walking distance to the campus. So then she found the room in the dormitory where I was staying, where -- across, which was right out, just a little distance down, down the hill from the University of Cincinnati. And I stayed, it was a three-story dormitory, they had a few private rooms down on the second floor. The house mother lived on the first floor, and the large room upstairs was what was called the dorm room and there were eight of us. It was the cheapest room in the dormitory. And so I had seven roommates. We all kind of lived in these -- we had our little nooks, you know.

And then very, very soon after that, I met another Nisei girl by the name of Rose Hiraga. She was an art -- she was from California, Los Angeles. She was an art major and she came through the line at the cafeteria and she said, "I'm Henry Itoi's cousin, you know, my mother is Henry Itoi's mom's sister." And so she said, "I heard that you were here, and that one of my cousins told me that you were here." So she introduced herself, and then we -- and then she told me that she was living with a family and working as a house, housemaid and trying to work for room and board. She was not very happy because she didn't have time to study and so forth. So I told her where I was living. I said, you know, "I just moved into this dormitory and we have," there was space in the dorm room as far as I knew, and I asked, told her, "Why don't you go and find..." So she did, she moved in very quickly, in a matter of a week or two. And so we became very close friends. From there, we lived together for up until the first -- that was my first year. Rose, meanwhile, was not happy with the art department at University of Cincinnati, so she moved to the Rhode Island School of Design and I -- so we, after a year, and then I told her, "Well, I'm not going to stay here for very long, I'm going to try to apply to another school and maybe go to New York." And we said, "Well, okay, if you're going to, you know, let's go live in New York." We both had, New York seemed like a very glamorous place to us. So we talked about that and we thought we'd meet there and that's what we did. Essentially, after I graduated from -- after I left Cincinnati, I went to NYU, my third year and Rose graduated from Rhode Island School of Design. She was a junior by that time and when I was a sophomore, I think, I mean, she was two years ahead of me because she was about a year or two older. And she came to live with me in New York. So we became roommates again, and so she was actually probably one of my closest friends, of the Nisei friends that I had. And --

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.