Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Aya Uenishi Medrud Interview
Narrator: Aya Uenishi Medrud
Interviewer: Daryl Maeda
Location: Denver, Colorado
Date: May 13, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-maya-01-0026

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AM: But I spent the first two or three years back in school, and I was in the fine arts department, and that was a good place because the people are much more liberal there than the rest of Boulder might be. And I remember carrying a lot of petitions against this and against that, and petitioning for this and petitioning for that. So I remember that I spent a lot of time -- in fact, a lot of people remember me from those days from... I always had a sheaf of papers, "Will you sign this?" and explain why I wanted them to sign. But I think that the thing that really culminated in an experience that sort of made me think about what I needed to do, and that was Cambodia was invaded during the Vietnam War, and the students were all -- this was 1968, I believe it was. The students were rioting, and they seized the Twenty-eighth Street bridge, which was the connection from Boulder to Denver. And I remember I was taking a class and I was coming out of the classroom, and one of the students, one of the guys said to me, "Let me walk you to your car." And I said, "Why are you, why do you, why are you worried about that?" And he says, "Well, I wanted to walk you to your car because students are rioting," and he was worried about my safety. And I remember saying to him and looking at him and saying, "I'm not worried about the students, what I'm worried more about is the police." And I was absolutely right because just at that very moment that he had offered to walk me to my car, a very good friend of mine who was professor -- well, he was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and we'd known him for many, many years -- and his wife were beaten up by the police because they happened to be in the wrong place. The police were roaring down to the Twenty-eighth Street bridge, and walked, and were running down University Avenue, which is just above Twenty-eighth Street. And they beat them up and they broke his jaw. He's probably the most gentle person you ever saw, but he had a martini in his glass, and he was walking out to the front yard, and this sheriff's deputy came and hit him immediately with his truncheon and broke his jaw, broke all his teeth, broke I don't know what else. Anyway, and his wife, who came out to see what was going on, got the same treatment and got beaten up by the sheriff's department. So the next time I saw the student who had offered to walk me across the street, I said, "Remember when you offered to walk me across to my car, and you were worried that I wouldn't be safe?" I said, "'Cause at that moment, and I told you that it was the police that I was worried more about?" I said, "Absolutely, that's exactly what happened." So I think that was a lesson for me about the people you, most people trust are not necessarily the ones I trust.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.