<Begin Segment 16>

TI: And then talk about your schooling. So you returned to Seattle, you're in high school now. So what high school did you go to?

KT: My senior year I spent at Broadway High School. And I finished my senior year, and then after I finished Broadway High School, I wasn't too sure what I was gonna, whether I was gonna go to college or not. But at that time, I was thinking, "Hey, it might be nice to be a mechanic." So I signed up at Edison vocational school for their auto repair course, and there were so many applicants on that that they told me that, no, we couldn't sign up there. But for one year we would have to sign up as a general shop course. And I said, "Hey, general shop, that's good because that'll give me a chance to use these power machinery," which is something I regretted in Hunt High School, we didn't have any vocational training because there was no equipment. And here I said, "Hey, I'll get to operate a lay and do all these layout works and whatnot. So I said, "Hey, being in a general shop will be fine with me." So I was working in the general shop and getting along real good. There, the general shop instructor, John Yeager, I think it was, I remember his name because he, you know, watched my work, and he knew I understood all the mathematics because to layout aluminum, you had to make allowance for the bending of aluminum as you bend the curve, and you have to figure that in as you draw the plan. And I was real good at making my layout, and I could make layout for a box and fold it up, and outside dimension will match, you know. Whereas if you didn't make allowance for those bends, the dimension never matched what you were supposed to do, because you didn't allow for the bending. And he recognized that I knew how to do those kind of things with minimal instruction. I could catch on just reading the thing. And he encouraged me to. He said, "No, you should really go to college. You got the mind to, for, you're good in math, you know these skills in here, you should really go to college." So when he said that, I said, "Oh, maybe I should go to college." So I went to college, and I'm glad he steered me in the right direction.

TI: Do you remember having a conversation with your father about whether or not you should go to college or...

KT: No, they didn't really encourage me to go to college, but they also made it well-known that if I did go to college, the only thing I would be expected to do was to earn enough during the summer to pay for my tuition. But free room and board, which was the major expense anyway. So I said, "Hey, that's good, I'll go to college." And every summer I worked during the summer, made enough money to earn for my college tuition. When I started, it was only thirty-five dollars a quarter. [Laughs] And I think when I finished it was fifty dollars a quarter.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.