<Begin Segment 24>

TI: And so what, tell me her full name, in terms of her maiden name, everything.

JI: It's Olivia.

TI: Olivia?

JI: Olivia Brandhorse Ishikawa, although she doesn't use Brandhorse, she uses Irene.

TI: And I'm curious, as you started dating her, how did her family react to this?

JI: Well, her, we were kind of friends, but they really didn't want her to get married. He had grown up in Oklahoma, and knew about "squaw men," men who married Indian women and so forth. And so he was really very nervous about it. And her mother, of course, went along with him, although I invited her to come to our wedding when we were married in Denver, and I went there with my best man, and we were married in a little church in Denver with no family from either side. And it's funny because selective memory, my mother-in-law once talked to Livie and said, "So-and-so got married, I feel so sorry for her. Can you imagine? Her mother wouldn't even go to her wedding." And Livie thought, "Gosh, Mom, you gotta pick your targets better than that." [Laughs] She had selective memory about that.

TI: So it sounds like Olivia's parents were against the marriage.

JI: Yeah. Well, that's the reason we gave her, Livie got a job in L.A., and I stayed in Nebraska, and we gave them a year to get used to the idea. And then by... and they never did, but her uncle came over one day from St. Louis was visiting her family, and he came to visit us and said, or maybe he just told them that this was wrong. And so they all came over for dinner one time and her sister was wondering why I'm doing the cooking. I said, "Well, Livie doesn't know how to cook." "She's the only one of us girls who does know how to cook." So the cat was out of the bag and so Livie started doing as much cooking as I am, more later on.

TI: But how much longer did it take her parents to come to that dinner?

JI: Well, we had just moved back to Lincoln, we were there, I had resigned from the university and was going to go to Des Moines, Dwight had asked me to come to Des Moines to work from there. And so I, it was probably a matter of weeks after that.

TI: Well, how about your family, your siblings and your father, how did they react?

JI: Well, they, when she was in L.A., she met my family because Hank had moved back and Chiyo had moved back, and Johnny hadn't, but he met her some, someplace else, I forget where. But they were all very nice to her, but Chiyo, who would teach her how to cook Japanese food and all, kept hoping that she would meet a nice Caucasian person there and I would meet a nice Japanese girl there. My father, who was living with me, was the best of all. He said, "You're getting" -- I was over thirty at this point -- he said, "You know, you ought to think about, you ought to think about getting married, and it's okay if you marry a Japanese woman -- I mean, if you marry a hakujin, a Caucasian." And I thought, "I'm going to put this old boy to the test," so I said, "What if I married a black girl?" 'cause I'd been active in the black community and that kind of thing, and so it wouldn't be out of the realm of the possible. And he says, without hesitation, he says, "Well, if you loved her and weren't doing it just to try to prove something, making a political statement." And I thought, "That's the right answer." And so I thought that was very good. Of course, if I wanted to marry a Japanese girl, there weren't very many in Lincoln at that time. Most of the Nisei students had gone back to the West Coast, various places.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.