<Begin Segment 38>

AI: Well, before you move on to Kansas, I wanted to ask a little bit more about, about the times. The years that you were at Syracuse, '67, '68, and you graduated from that program in '69, were in, in the world, very significant things were happening. You had the whole kind of hippie movement emerged, the, in music, the Beatles had Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Democratic Convention that summer of '68 in Chicago.

RS: Uh-huh.

AI: And then of course, later on, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

RS: Yeah. I remember the Democratic Convention because we were in Maine and we were watching it on TV. And one of the graduate students' father had a resort on a place called Scarborough Beach, in Maine. And she had invited this small group of people to come up and spend two weeks there at this resort. And there were a lot of people, sort of old Maineites staying at this resort that were in this big TV-watching area. And I remember sitting in there when everything broke loose. And, of course, we were all just glued to the TV and all these old people were screaming, "Rip the hair off of those damn hippies," and they were all screaming. And the rest of us were just sitting there, the graduate students in art, just sort of freaked-out. And I remember, because I was not a very political person at that time, and I've talked about sort of making this gradual shift from the right to the left. And I remember how significant that those evenings were because we were watching this thing every night and how that, that began to galvanize me as to how I was feeling about that, because I was so angry. And these hostile words that were coming out of these people's mouths just resonated with a lot of other things that I heard coming out of my parents' mouth and all of that.

So, again, without being demonstrative or something, I knew that these changes were happening in me. And the fact, being away from Seattle and that whole community, and really being on my own for the first time, being my own person, and being around people that I didn't know that I'd become very close to was a real reshuffling of the deck. And so that Democratic Convention had a lot to do with it. And I think more than I actually recognized, because when I got to Kansas that's when I realized that I had really changed. And I remember my, Dave Setsuda, who always had been my closest friend up here in Seattle, told me once -- and Dave was the last person in the world that I would ever expect to hear that kind of observation from -- but I remember him telling me, he says, "Boy you've changed a lot over the years." And I was just sort of, to hear him say that kind of punctuated or brought to surface that change. And I realized, God, if it was apparent to Dave, I must have really changed. And for the first time sort of saw myself outside of myself, that I was. But going to Kansas at that particular time was -- Kansas was, as much as any school in the country, just sort of literally went up in flames.

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.