<Begin Segment 43>

MA: At that point you decided not to go and apply at the University of Washington and do something else?

GM: Uh-huh, yeah. And it might have been a mistake, and I've regretted it a little bit, but I chose photography as a profession, okay? So now --

MA: So, can you give a little background on why were you so interested in photography? Had that been a hobby of yours?

GM: Yeah, it's been a hobby, and I've been quite interested in it. At this point, the photography is rather in the beginning of photography. Once you get the basics, you're pretty well advanced, and I decided to go to the best school in the country, which was in New Haven, Connecticut. And it was on the Yale campus, not part of Yale but on the Yale campus, and very expensive. And I used the four years of college eligibility of my GI bill to go to this school for nine months. So I used my GI bill and used four years' eligibility in nine months and graduated out of the photo school.

MA: How did your, your father and your sister feel about you going so far away?

GM: Well, it's nothing new, I've been gone enough times in the army and things like that. So we're all looking for something, it seems like, at that time. So it's really, they didn't care. Because when you're in camp, lot of the kids left camp with twenty-five dollars, and went back to Chicago and New York and Washington, D.C. on that twenty-five dollar and started a new life. And you know, that's kind of ridiculous when you think of it. That's like today you might have five hundred dollars on you and you get on a train and you go back east looking for a job. You don't have enough money to even pay rent. And twenty-five dollars was all they had. So a lot of 'em did it, and those are the stories that are real interesting. Eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old girls leaving by theirselves to go to do some kind of work somewhere they don't even know nothing about. Yeah.

MA: What were your expectations going over to school? I mean, in terms of living in a completely new place?

GM: Well, the desire to make yourself get a good job, I thought photography was a good opportunity, but really it wasn't. First of all, if you, I went to, after getting out of New Haven, Connecticut, I was in New York City doing camera repair. I had my own business there because my teacher gave me his shop.

MA: Your teacher in photography school?

GM: Uh-huh, gave me his shop to use as a business place. And I watched other students come into New York, and kept close touch with them and it was tough. These kids would go up to, I think it was 570 Lexington, where the, all these big magazines like Vogue and Good Housekeeping, all the design or model type magazines, were all located in this one building in New York, about fifteen stories high. And these kids would get out of school and start at the bottom, bottom floor and go into every advertising firm and ask for a job. And it'd take 'em weeks to go from the first floor up to the fifteenth floor, but they always got this one answer: "do you have any experience?" Because they're willing to hire you, even as a Japanese. "Do you have any experience?" You have to say, "No, I've been to school and I graduated out of school and here's my samples," and stuff, and they said, "Well, when you get some experience, come on back." That was the answer most of 'em got. And they go up the next, all the way up to the fifteenth floor day after day, and tried to get these jobs. Once in a while, somebody would get a job, but they want you to have experience. And if you don't, if you haven't worked before, you don't have any experience.

MA: It seemed like you were lucky, though, because you had your teacher who gave you his, his space.

GM: Well, that's right, because the teacher supplied me a place of business, and he allowed me to use all his equipment and his supplies, and all I'd do is repair, it was a camera repair shop. Repair cameras and deliver 'em.

MA: So in school, did you learn more about camera repair, is that it? Or --

GM: The school?

MA: Yeah, in school, what did you study?

GM: That's, that's one of the courses that I was able to get into. There was four courses: portrait photography, commercial photography, color photography and then camera repair. And in order to get into each course, you had to compete and be in the top so many to get into the next course. And in the camera repair, you had to be the top ten of the whole students to get into camera repair.

<End Segment 43> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.