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AI: Well, so how did you -- financially -- how did you make it through the medical school? Were you --

RI: Medical school? Oh, medical school, yes, I applied for a scholarship. And in those days, believe it or not, tuition was about four hundred -- I'm not sure whether it was four hundred or six hundred dollars a year, and now it's thousands. And I, I applied, and I think the first two years I got a scholarship for the tuition. But board and room I had to take care of myself. So the first year my youngest sister, Lillian, she came to Philadelphia with her girlfriend from camp and they worked in Philadelphia, rented an apartment near the medical school and I stayed with them. So actually, I got free board and they were supporting me. And I don't know whether I contributed towards the food but they both went to work downtown and came back and I ate with them and then I studied while... so the first year, that's what happened.

Then the second year there was a YMCA house and they have, they had rooms for about three students upstairs and during the evening they served an evening meal to the students. And they needed a manager, so I became the manager, managing the menus and the renters and sort of taking care of the house. So that way I got my board and room. But tuition I got a scholarship.

Then junior and senior year, well, I think I kept working there, but I don't know, I don't think I got scholarship all the way through, but I don't know where the money came. Oh, by then I probably started to work because after my second year my parents were back in Seattle and I came to Seattle and immediately got a job at a factory down, down on First Avenue making garments. And so I was at a power machine and I remember we were making jackets, sewing jackets. And I was supposed to be putting the buttonholes on the jacket so the jackets are fed to a machine and the machine goes rrrrrrrrr, cut, then it moves up, and that's going so slowly, but you can't make it go any faster. So in the meantime I had a book on the side and I let it go there and then, and I'd keep -- actually it was going that slowly. But you can't make it go any faster. But that's what I did one summer. So I made some money.

And then another summer... oh, in the meantime, my sister, Fran, relocated in Cleveland and she was married and so I stayed there and I worked at a factory in Cleveland sewing chevron -- what do you call those? -- emblems that sew onto the soldiers' sleeves. It must've been a wartime factory. But I worked there. I was a good, good worker but it was very boring and it was piecework and I'd go just as fast as I could. But that was hard work. But anyway, I made some money that way. So I must have paid for my own tuition in some way.

But in the meantime, Kazuko, Kazuko, when I got to medical school, Kazuko Uno was already there and I was starting my first year and she was going to start the second half of her first year. So she, she is a Seattle girl who went to UW and pre-med and then she got her degree just like my sister did. She was a year ahead of me. She got her degree at a temporary camp in California. And they lived in South Park. Her father was a farmer in South Park. And they were evacuated to... I don't know the name of that temporary camp. But, by the time she applied for medical school she was at Tule Lake. So she said at Tule Lake somebody in the hospital helped her apply to Woman's Medical. And I don't know whether she had problem getting into medical school but she, she was, she was a smart girl, smarter than I ever was. So probably there was no problem scholastically. But because her family could not afford to send her to school she worked her way, she got board and room from the hospital by working at night to be on call to do laboratory tests, blood tests, when, for instance somebody who had appendicitis goes in the middle of the night, well, you do a white count right away, that kind of thing. She was on call. So she, she did that and then she took half of the first-year classes. And when I got there she took the other half. So she and I were in the freshman class, but she had already had half the classes so I didn't see her that much. And then at night she was working and she was busy. But, from the second year she and I, we went through together, so she and I graduated together, Kazuko Uno. In the meantime, right now she lives in Issaquah and she's married to a hakujin boy but he is originally from Turkey. She met him in Detroit.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.