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SY: And when you graduated from Roosevelt, your parents had already gotten a house?

CI: No, they didn't get a house until later, couple of years later. But they rented, they rented a house. And then by then I had started East L.A. College, and I think I told you about how I was introduced to L.A. County Hospital School of Nursing. Because the two teachers that I met at East L.A., they didn't have, I needed to take anatomy and microbiology, and they didn't have a lab at the high school.

SY: There was a high school associated with East L.A. College?

CI: Yes. Not Roosevelt, the other one. Well, anyway, I'll think about in a minute. Anyway, so I used to ride with them to County Hospital and they had a lab there so I started taking lab classes with the student nurses which is how I ended up as a student nurse at County because I used to go with the teachers.

SY: So the teachers sort of took a liking to you, kind of?

CI: No, it was the fact that I needed to take anatomy and they didn't have it at East L.A. because they were borrowing this... I still can't remember the name of the high school.

SY: The high school's lab.

CI: Yeah.

SY: But what about the other kids who were in your same position?

CI: Well, I don't know that there was anybody else in my position, because East L.A. was very new at that time. I was student number... I still had my card. I was only student number 69 or something.

SY: And you knew when you went to East L.A. that you wanted to go into nursing?

CI: I did. But I was anticipating going to either Berkeley or someplace else. But then once I was introduced to... I met some of the student nurses.

SY: And you were still in your first year of college when this happened?

CI: I was, yes.

SY: So how many years of schooling did it take to...

CI: Well, because I was taking that and I was kind of taking an accelerated, like I was taking like twenty-seven units at one time. Because of that, I finished East L.A. I think about in a year and a half I had my AA degree. It was very fast.

SY: Uh-huh. And so then you starting taking courses at L.A. --

CI: No, then I enrolled at the School of Nursing at Big County Hospital. School of Nursing is a three-year program and you go in and it's very, at that time it was very, probably the outstanding school on the West Coast. Very competitive to get into the school, and so all we had to do was pay kind of a basic tuition. And they gave five uniforms and books for the first semester. And then once you got in they gave you twenty dollars a month stipend plus room and board and medical care. So it was a very...

SY: Prestigious, kind of, to get in.

CI: Yeah, but it was very great to get in because your schooling is almost paid for.

SY: And how did you, what was the process of getting in? You just applied?

CI: You applied and then you had to take a series of tests. They tested us someplace in Hollywood Testing Bureau or something, I don't know. I had to take a bus to get to that place.

SY: So that became more, a better place to go to school than a four-year college then?

CI: For me, yeah. And then I wanted to get into UCLA, but because I had gone to Hyde Park High School, and I had gone to high school in camp, I started my foreign language at Stevenson Junior High School. I didn't have three years of a foreign language. I had two years of this and then I had a year of Latin, so I didn't qualify to get to UCLA.

SY: So you would have to take more language to get in.

CI: I would have had to take another year of some kind of language, probably Latin or another semester of Spanish. So it probably turned out well for me.

SY: So was that very common? When people got out of camp, well, you went to high school, but to find, to get back into school and to find jobs, was it hard to do?

CI: Well, especially I think for nursing. At that time, nursing was a three-year program, hospital-based, and so it's relatively uniform and that's how most of us went to nursing school. Now it's almost all collegiate programs.

SY: But it was still hard to get in then, back then?

CI: I would say so. Because I understood that there were something like close to eight hundred applicants and then they took 150. So it was very competitive.

SY: And so you were among, did you have friends that went into this nursing program as well?

CI: One friend that we had worked together at Japanese Hospital.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.