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AI: I see. Well, and so then, did you... I'm not sure when you started at Stanford. Was that the fall of 1938? Or was it later in the --

RC: Fall.

AI: It was fall.

RC: Fall, (yes). One of the things that I did, both in high school and junior college, I enjoyed being in plays. And it sharpened my wits in a way, memorizing parts. And so I took drama classes in junior college. In high school it was an after-school activity, like sports. There was always a group that liked to be in a play, and there were (...) usually (...) two plays a semester in high school. And then in junior college we had a series of plays during a year. When I went down to Stanford, (...) I appeared in maybe six plays in my junior and senior year. I didn't have time for it in my graduate year. The student teaching took the time, you see.

AI: What kind of plays were you in? What were some of your favorites?

RC: Well, they were Shakespeare plays I was in, which were rather interesting, at Stanford. And (...) the one play that I enjoyed the most was a very not well-known play, Tobias and the Angel. [Laughs] But, one of the Shakespearian plays was Richard, Richard II, (...) very difficult. And at the moment, I can't think of the name of the Shakespearian expert, he was from Europe. He was in Hollywood doing some work there, on movies. He was the friend of the director at Stanford, and he came up to Stanford to see this Richard II play. He was very critical, (but) our director admonished him by saying, "Well, what do you expect when these young people have classes that they're taking? They have a lot of homework to do, and we only worked on this six weeks." (...) He met us all in the green room after (the play). He looked at us, and he looked at our director, and said, "It vas goot. It vas goot." [Laughs] So he changed his mind (...). I was in a Russian play and (a) Russian (official) was, he was in San Francisco, in a San Francisco office, and he came down to see it. It was called The Three Sisters, (a) Chekhov play. And he was a little bit negative. It wasn't quite what he expected. Well, it wasn't, it wasn't Russian, it was an Americanized version. But that was my activity other than going to classes and (...) writing papers and so forth.

And I took speech classes. And one summer I went down to USC for a summer session, which was a wonderful experience for me. I took American Literature classes and public speaking. And that was my first experience of doing extemporaneous speaking. It was a wonderful experience.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.