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AI: Well, so then, after you graduated from your grade school, and then you went on to ninth grade at a different school...

RC: My ninth grade was in a junior high setting. It was -- it seemed that I grew up in bungalows. [Laughs] I went from one bungalow school to another bungalow school. (...) The school, the junior high that I went to, was in east Sacramento and it was on the grounds of another elementary school. I think there were three elementary schools where the ninth grade went together. We were all in bungalows and we walked on wooden sidewalks, you might call them, from one room to the next. And I spent a year there with my twin, and then we went to Sacramento High, which was a very lovely building. It was, and yet, after being in bungalows nearly all my school life, the first thing (our) homeroom was in a bungalow at Sacramento High. It was the plant science room, classroom. And I thought, gee, am I ever going to get into a building without bungalows? Well, most of them (had) nice (buildings).

AI: Well, for people who don't have a visual image of a bungalow, could you describe a little bit about what it was like?

RC: Well, it could be cold, to begin with. It was a wooden building. And there was a wood stove. And somebody had to tend to the wood pile. And there was always a place where they could get wood if it (...) needed to be stoked up and... one time, all of a sudden the legs of the wood stove collapsed. And of course coals came out. And we had a fire drill very fast. [Laughs] It was quite exciting.

AI: Oh, my.

RC: The tallest boy was ordered by the teacher to run, run to the principal's office and get the custodians, have them bring buckets of water. Well, by the time they got there, we had the fire under control.

AI: What a lot of excitement.

RC: A lot of excitement, yes. But, then when I went on from high school to junior college, more bungalows. But it showed the sign, the growth of the city. And by the time I left junior college those bungalows were gone and nice buildings had been built. The bungalows at high school were gone and the building had been completed, and the same for junior high.

AI: Well, now in high school, did you already have an idea or a plan for your future, what you thought you might do after graduation?

RC: Really, no. My twin was very creative. She wanted to design clothes. And she knew where she wanted to go. She wanted to go to southern California to a school where she could study costume design. And that's where she did go. I, after high school, (...) went to junior college and had my first two years of college there, and that was about the time when I decided I wanted to be a teacher, and worked hard so I could enter Stanford. One of the things that made it difficult was the fact that I, my twin and I were mid-term people, and I graduated in January, from high school. That meant I graduated from junior college in January and I didn't want to go down to Stanford because I had to take my finals in December before Christmas vacation, and then register that winter quarter at Stanford. So I spent two-and-a-half years in junior college. And the interesting thing about that was that I was able to take come courses that I -- sociology things -- that I would not have been able to get in. So, by the time I had had two-and-a-half years of junior college I had a pretty good preparation and knowledge of what I wanted to be in the future.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.