<Begin Segment 17>

TI: So you talked about leaving Illinois after that class. What did you do after that? After Illinois, what did you do?

PT: My father was dying so I stuck around and I worked making milk bottle tops. It's got wax on it, and I worked the night shift. It's clean work for the first time, all you have to do is run the machine and feed it with wax and so forth. Then I get off at night and in Chicago they have the...

TI: Elevated train.

PT: Elevated train, and get on that and I'd go downtown, and it's warm. And sometimes I'll go to a place and have a couple of drinks and just listen to jazz. I didn't want be with anybody, just want to be with myself. And then just before you go to this one place, there's another jazz place. The only instrument is the guitar. He's the guy that makes the guitar the instrument. I don't know if you watch some of these shows or not, the guy would be playing the guitar and maybe somebody would be hitting the drum, that's it. And I was astonished that this guy was doing that. Later on I remembered him, he was doing beautiful music just with the guitar. T-Bone Walker. And I decided I would go to school. My father died and my sister would take care of my mother, and she was married, so I got on a bus and came to Berkeley. I didn't know anyone in Berkeley, but I knew how to survive without any money, that is become a schoolboy again, and I did it for just about one semester. And then this big chunk comes to me, over five hundred dollars. They didn't pay me for...

TI: Oh, the factory work?

PT: They didn't pay me for the first semester.

TI: Oh, for the GI Bill?

PT: Yes. For the first time in my life, I stayed in an all-Japanese guys, right across the street for the university. And we had rooms for something like twenty dollars a month, but we also had a kitchen. And there was one upper class Japanese guy that says, "What are we having? Rice again?" [Laughs] So we said, "What's the matter? Aren't you Japanese?" So I met another guy, a loser like me, and we learned to play...

TI: Golf?

PT: Golf, and there was that thing very close here, and you didn't have to pay for it. For students it's free. So we played golf in the morning and then in the afternoon I gambled, played poker. I wasn't serious about it, just a 'C' student. And I got one 'D', so I had to make up for it somehow, so there was a guy named Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary saw us playing softball and he says, "How do you guys want to play?" and he'll be the manager and play on the Oakland league. And we did; we lost every game. [Laughs] And then we were in a car, riding together, and he said, "What are you majoring in?" and I said, "Golf." [Laughs] "But seriously, I don't have a major." So he says to take his class and I did.

TI: And what class was that? What class was he teaching?

PT: It was a...

TI: Psychology?

PT: Psychology, yes. He wasn't the teacher but he was the...

TI: Like a TA?

PT: TA, yes. So he gave me a 'B' so that brought me back to a 'C' average.

TI: Oh, that's funny. So Timothy Leary helped you out.

PT: He didn't know that, but he helped me out. And then gradually his friendship turned me around.

TI: But going back to him, so what was he like? When you say "friendship," how would you describe Timothy Leary in terms of your relationship with him?

PT: He was genuinely concerned about me. This is before his drug years. And he also was interested in the fact that I was in a concentration camp. He didn't ask a lot of questions but he did ask, "Do you think you lost interest in becoming an academic?" Little questions like that. "In what was has that hurt you?" It did hurt me in the sense that I didn't give a shit anymore. In many ways, he turned me around. He doesn't know that, but he did. Then he said, "What is it that you're interested in?" and I said, "I don't know." So I started taking courses in criminology. They didn't have criminology there, they called it something else, it was under the Political Science Department. And there was a guy who was a visiting professor. You remember him? This white guy from the Middle West that turned me on to criminology? Anyway, he took an interest in me and invited me to his house to meet his wife and have dinner. So I became an 'A' student again. [Laughs]

TI: And so what did you graduate in? What was your major?

PT: I graduated in psychology because I had more credits there, just barely. And then I went to work.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.