<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So let's talk about you, you now graduate from college and so what happens next?

NA: Actually, I didn't. I got married. I met, I met George the first week of college.

TI: The first week at San Francisco State? Okay.

NA: And we didn't get serious until junior getting to senior year. And then it got to a point, well, he had already had gotten his degree, had been out of the army, had gotten his degree, and he was thinking of going into medicine.

TI: And so how much older was George than you?

NA: Five.

TI: Five years.

NA: Four and a half, five years. So he was then going off to Stanford. He had been accepted into Stanford, and decided we couldn't be without each other.

TI: And so you dropped out of school --

NA: Yeah.

TI: -- and went down with him down to, what, Palo Alto, down that area.

NA: To Stanford. Yeah, lived in the Stanford housing area.

TI: And so, yeah, I, so again, how much do you want to talk about George and the relationship? How much do you want me to ask? I mean, is this...

NA: He's a pretty good guy. He really, he really, he just at the end didn't have no account for taste in women. You get it? [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] Let's talk about the early years, so what was it, so he was a...

NA: He was a bio-science major. He had gone off to, he had, the Korean War was on and he was at that time, not knowing what he wanted to do, he went off, went to San Mateo, what is it, San Mateo Community College, I guess. He lived in Hayward; he grew up in Hayward. But it was that time in the Korean War era where they would now, they were gonna have the draft come in, and if you get drafted then you have to be in the reserves for something like eight or ten years or something like that. Or you could join the army and get it over in three years. So he was apparently at a stage where he says, well, not quite sure yet where he's, wants to do, so he must have joined the army and get it over with, and he got picked up with the MIS and he got put into the Military Intelligence Service Army Language School focused on Russian.

TI: Oh, interesting, not Japanese.

NA: Russian. And so he got the full Russian, he had the Russian down and he thought, okay, this is not bad, maybe get sent to Japan, right? No, they sent him up to the Aleutian Islands. Aleutian Islands right there next to Russia, and what do you do? You have to listen in on everything, right? It's Russia and this whole thing. So that's, but to him that was the most important time of his life because the group that he got thrown in together in the MIS and in this particular language section, and the people were already people who had gotten out of university. They were from Harvard, they were from Yale, they were from all over, and George, bless his heart, he's a good, he's always an explorer. Like he loved the beat generation, I mean, he'd go down and explore and learn about what it would be to be beat. He was really a very kind of like wide open, trying to learn new stuff and get very excited about it. He doesn't get so carried away that he comes a beat himself, but he gets engaged enough to start to understand what is the rhythm and poetry writing or things that expand him. Well, he's among this group of well-educated, some of them, because of the -- because remember, in those days Harvard and all of those were all just kind of like elite old boys' school. It wasn't like, like it is now when anybody, if you can apply yourself and you can get the grades, you got the money, you could go kind of situation.

TI: It was almost like your father had to have gone or...

NA: Exactly. It's an old boys' club. And so George got thrown in among those folks, and what happened is he, he had said, told us that up there in the Aleutian Islands, he says, there's nothing you could do, right, so they started a kind of seminar, so somebody would teach the others something. So I said, "What did you teach 'em?" He said he taught them how to play canasta, or bridge or something like that. That was what he was. But there he got exposed to other kinds of things, including furthering his love for music and all, and some people would lecture on Beethoven and the whole thing, or whatever their specialty was.

TI: And so for you, you're in your early twenties, to meet such a worldly person, I mean, he'd been exposed to a lot, he was older, service, must've been a pretty powerful experience for you.

NA: Well actually I didn't like him too much in the beginning. [Laughs] Yes, it was very powerful. Okay, uh-huh. No.

TI: [Laughs] But you, eventually you decided to marry.

NA: Yeah, eventually.

TI: What was your family's reaction? Because you're about twenty-two?

NA: No, not even that.

TI: Twenty-one?

NA: Yeah. Twenty, yeah, something like that.

TI: Twenty, twenty-one when you, so what was the reaction of your family?

NA: Well, obviously they had met him and all that, and my dad right away -- this was his final year of farming. My father was turning fifty, he said okay, this is the last year. He knew the kids would not take over farming, no matter how, to him it could've, they could've. And he says, "I knew that when you guys were young because we'd walk down the field and none of you would stoop to pick and weed automatically." So he just knew none of us would be that. So anyway, "So the idea is, if you guys are gonna get married you had only two choices, either get married before the crop starts, which is in February, or you get married in, what is it, October or something, after the, we finish the crop." Well, George had to start university, he was gonna go into university in March, the spring, so he said, "Well, let's get married now."

TI: In February.

NA: So we got married in February.

TI: So it happened quite rapidly when you decided to do it.

NA: Yeah, it was a matter of like six months or something like that, but we'd been going around for about a year -- well, I've known him since the first day of college, but we started to go around, I guess, for about a year.

TI: So your parents had met him. Your family had met him. And so what was the reaction of you getting married at a relatively young age?

NA: Well in those days that's not too unusual. I mean, it's only after the next generation that comes in getting married at thirty years old. In those days, yeah, it was pretty much anywhere from, what, nineteen to twenty, I guess if you're getting towards twenty-four you're pretty old. I mean, in those days. So it was not, it wasn't, like, weird.

TI: So it wasn't, it wasn't viewed as early or anything like that. Okay. So this is a big shift in your life, and this is where we're actually gonna stop.

NA: Oh, good.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.