<Begin Segment 4>

TI: So after you graduated from high school, what did you do?

BB: I didn't graduate from high school.

TI: Oh, so what happened?

BB: I got expelled from high school.

TI: Oh, tell me this story. This, this is... [laughs]

BB: No. No, no. I got blamed for getting a girl pregnant that I had one date with and never kissed. I wasn't the guy that got her pregnant. She happened to be the mayor's daughter.

TI: Boy, that's a story.

BB: So every one of us that had a date with this girl had to come to the principal's office, and three or four of us that wouldn't admit to anything and didn't know what had happened, and got kicked out. So I was kicked out my senior year.

TI: Were you the only one who was then kicked out?

BB: No, there were three or four of us that got expelled from this deal. Two of us ended up in the tank company. Joe Errington and I, we both ended up in the national guard.

TI: What a story. This was the mayor of Salinas?

BB: At that time, yeah, it was his daughter.

TI: That's amazing.

BB: I had nothing to do with it. That's, that's the funny part of it.

TI: Well, it seems so unfair that that happened. So after that incident, then what did you do?

BB: I found out that I couldn't return to high school for a couple years because of the state laws, so I went to junior college instead. I enrolled in junior college, and I was in junior college when the, we got inducted into service. But in the meantime, I had to go to night school. See, I worked for an ice plant, and they were always trying to make, get new operators to run the ice plant. So I was one of the fellows selected to go to school, so I went three years to night school to study refrigeration. Didn't get a degree for any of that, just got, finally got a license to be an engineer, that's it.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.