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MA: So, I'm curious about, you said you were the first child in your family to not have an arranged marriage. So how did you meet your husband?

BK: Well, my husband had set up practice in the valley. He worked for another veterinarian for two years in a neighboring town, and then he moved to Alamosa and set up his own practice. And so his folks were telling him, "Well, you need to get married. You need to get married." So his uncle was trying to arrange a marriage for him. So he met this girl and took her out this one time, and he said he didn't like her. Well, she was my friend, happened to be my friend. So she would come to Alamosa and we would chase around looking for Ben. [Laughs] And he finally said, "Well, I'll go out with you if Bessie will come with me." And so I said, "I really don't want to go," and she said, "Well, he won't go with me unless you come along." And so I did and he'd just lean over and talk to me all night and so that's how it got started. And so we'd only gone together about three months and decided we wanted to get married and so I came home and I told my folks. And they were in bed already. So I told them, and there was dead silence. And I thought, "Oh, my gosh, what is going to happen?" But they went ahead and let us. But we, like I said earlier, we had to do it with baishakunin and the whole thing.

MA: The traditional way.

BK: Yeah, uh-huh. That was back in 1953. And we've been married a long time, so it worked.

MA: So you've said, you were the first one in your family not to have an arranged marriage, and you had mentioned that you were sort of the brave one in the family. Where do you think that came from? Like where do you think... you know?

BK: I don't know, I don't know. I really don't know. But, I just never worried, like I said before. Things would happen and I don't know, maybe being the seventh, seventh daughter, I don't know. [Laughs] Lucky seven? I don't know, I don't know. But yeah. But I just... things just happened.

MA: And your husband is a veterinarian, you said.

BK: Yes, uh-huh.

MA: So what that was like back when he first started his practice and everything? Would he go all around the state, would he, how would that work?

BK: Well, no. It was mainly in the valley. And he built up a good reputation, and he was especially good at pregnancy checking cows, to see whether they were pregnant or not and whether they wanted to sell them or not. And so, gosh, he would be flown to Texas sometimes, he'd go into New Mexico and just do that because he was so fast with it. And he could do thousands in the day where some veterinarians had to put each one in a separate chute and it would take time. You couldn't do very many at a time. So yeah, he's had some neat experiences.

MA: And where was your husband born? Where is he from?

BK: He was from Fort Lupton, Platteville area, which is north of Denver. And he went to school at CSU, it was Colorado A&M back then. He graduated from veterinary school in 1950.

MA: Was his family a farming family?

BK: They had a dairy farm which was kind of unusual for a Japanese family. And so he grew up with cows and he said he knew he wanted to be a veterinarian since he was in the fifth grade, so that was his goal. He had an interesting experience when he was in college, he was in this honorary fraternity in vet school, and he was chosen as the delegate to go and the convention was held in Georgia. And one of the professors, he said he remembers him telling him that, "You need to be aware of some of these things when you go down south." But he had no idea until he got there that, when he go there, he thought, when he got on the bus he thought, "Am I supposed to sit in the front or the back? Am I supposed to drink from this white fountain or the black fountain?" And that was his very first encounter with prejudice of that sort.

MA: And was that in the '50s? '60s?

BK: Yeah, that was -- he probably went down there like either '49 or '50. Yeah.

MA: So segregation was still very much ingrained in that culture?

BK: Very much. But you don't think about that: are you black, are you white? You're not either, so what do you do?

MA: Yeah.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.