<Begin Segment 20>

AI: So, before our break you had been finishing up talking about your high school years and you graduated high school in 1957 and then went on to University of Washington. So, I wanted to just ask you a little bit more. You said how, during the summers you had your job doing the gardening, but what else was going on for you during those college years at University of Washington?

RS: Is that a cue?

AI: Yeah, yeah.

RS: For what? [Laughs]

AI: Just, well, as an undergrad, you, it sounded like pretty early on you decided that you did want to go into art. And you explained how you had argued with your father, had this discussion about a possible compromise.

RS: Uh-huh.

AI: But that once you realized his compromise meant dentistry, that you were not going to go that direction. So, what was your coursework like then, as an undergrad?

RS: Well, I was majoring in commercial design from the very beginning, and it was a BA degree. I'm not sure they even had a BFA degree at the time, which meant that there was more of a liberal arts emphasis than a professional emphasis. That meant fewer art courses, more other courses. And I remember the curriculum for me was filled with a lot of courses I didn't wanna take and that I really wasn't interested in, and really didn't do very well. In fact, I think I ended up on probation at the end of the first year I was there. And really had some serious questioning as to whether or not college was really meant for me and maybe I should be in art school. And it wasn't through, 'til the, going through four years that my grade point steadily improved every year until my senior year, I think, when I got a 4.0, but overall I was an academic loser because I really wasn't interested in all these courses. And because Washington was on a quarter system and not a semester system, that meant another 33 percent more courses. [Coughs] I think that hot coffee is loosening things up. So, I can't think of anything really extraordinary that happened during my undergraduate years, because as in commercial design was so different than painting and had virtually nothing to do with any sort of self-consciousness and was pretty much a craft that was being sort of sharply honed and developed.

AI: And so you had just mentioned that your grades actually did fairly steadily improve until your senior year where you were doing quite well.

RS: I think one of the reasons for that because as we moved towards the senior year, there was less of an emphasis upon academic courses and more of an emphasis upon art until the senior year where you were taking maybe only one academic course and a load of studio art courses. And those were the courses that I was doing better in.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.