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TI: Okay. So, but it sounds like around twenty years or so, you were in this...

MS: Federation.

TI: But then you make a shift from that, you go...

MS: As a Director of Volunteers.

TI: And so why, why the shift?

MS: You know, I just got kind of tired of recreation. It didn't seem to have activities and so forth. I did some interesting things there, too, but I became a Director of Volunteers, and then I went to work for Resthaven Psychiatric Hospital and Mental Health Center. And that was the first center west of the Mississippi River that was designated by the government as a mental health center. That was fascinating, because you used all kinds of modalities to treat patients. And we had a board, they did integrate and bring more Asians into the staff. Not only the staff, but into the board. But what was fascinating at Resthaven is that the universities and colleges were just beginning to understand that they needed different kind of training for their social work field, to understand like the Asians and the Latinos and so forth. So we had students, master's students from UCLA that came. And it was absolutely a fascinating place, because the modality was changing. They had music and dance and blah, blah, blah. And it was great. But what happened was some of the... I don't know if you've heard of the name Mo Nishida, and... he, they began to demand more different kinds of programming and so forth, and the quality just went down. So that's when I changed. And I was Director of Volunteers there at Resthaven Psychiatric Hospital, then I went to Kaiser.

TI: And again, same role? Director of Volunteers?

MS: Oh, fascinating, because Kaiser had not had directors of volunteers much. And so when I went there, there was a strike going on, and they gave me an office and left. [Laughs] But it was okay, because I really kind of knew what I was doing and it was fascinating. I was on their, the medical team, you know, their staff of the hospital from the head of the hospital. I'd go in and talk to him every so often, and they were really kind of... it was a kind of, place.

TI: But what strikes me when I look at your career is it's a career, actually, working with people a lot.

MS: And I got to do program planning. I got very good at that, yeah. In fact, I was there when my friend, who was a pediatrics nurse, enlarged the nursery at Bellflower and the one that they, the lady who had the eight babies, they were able to put them in that nursery.

TI: Oh, interesting.

MS: Yeah. It was a beautiful nursery.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.