<Begin Segment 8>

BN: The other question I was going to ask, actually, is you had alluded to your advisor noting that you were a little older. And I'm wondering if in your own mind you felt an additional urgency to get, both professionally and personally, to really get going on things.

RD: Oh, yeah. When you approach thirty and you haven't really gotten anywhere, you concentrate your mind wonderfully if you have any serious ambitions, and I'm a reasonably ambitious person. Not ambitious for necessarily the same things that everybody's ambitious for, but I was ambitious for a chance to have my say about certain matters.

So anyway, I'll tell you something about the relationship I had with my mentor. He came back, got the dissertation, got it back to me annotated and approved, except he wanted a final summary. I said I didn't need it, he agreed I didn't need it and said, "Do it anyway." So I did it, and that was approved. And he told me... classes were about, this was about two or three weeks before classes started. And he said, "Be in my office," at such and such a time. And this was the end of the week, either a Thursday or a Friday, I think it was a Thursday, before classes started. And I'm sitting there, well, I didn't know what he wanted. I'd find out. I sat there and he says, I came in and we talked a little bit, he says, "Sit there a minute," and he got the phone. And he called up University Extension and he said, "You know that class I'm scheduled to teach downtown? I suddenly discovered that I have professional duties and I can't possibly teach it." There was some kind of noise on the other end of the phone. He says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. However, I think I can find a graduate student who's already completed his dissertation who might be willing to take that course if you are interested. Well, I'll see if I can round him up. I'll call you later." And he put it down, we talked about the dissertation a little bit, and he explained to me that he'd been pushing people in the department and pushing various things, and that he'd arranged for me to have a half-time position as an administrative assistant in the Institute of Industrial Relations, what the hell that was about I didn't have the foggiest idea. And in addition, one of the members of my committee, a historian named Page Smith, was friendly with the novelist Irving Stone, who was having trouble understanding American puritanism and John and Abigail Adams about whom he was about to write a book, or was in the process of writing a book, and needed somebody to go through the Adams papers which were on microfilm out at the Huntington Library but they could get them from me. And then I met with him and worked out the other details. So that was two jobs, then later he called back and said, well, he'll do that. "I'll send him over to sign a contract tomorrow," or the next day or this sort of thing. So I had three part-time jobs. I eventually got a job the next year at a small public college in Wisconsin, and I took a pay cut. However, given the differences between the cost of living in Los Angeles, Judith and I had an apartment in Santa Monica... we couldn't get anywhere near Westwood. You probably don't know what the rent district is like at Westwood.

TI: Santa Monica is pretty expensive, too.

RD: Not then. Santa Monica was much less expensive. If you were very close to the beach -- we were on Eleventh Street, one block off Santa Monica, perfect for the bus, etcetera. So that was, so I took a pay cut the following year. But the cost of living in Platteville, Wisconsin, was significantly less than the cost of living in Los Angeles.

TI: We're an hour into it, why don't we take a short break?

RD: I want to finish what I'm saying here about this to give you an idea of what it was like in a town like Platteville. And Grant County, which I studied a little because I lived there for two years, was so economically depressed that it ranked second of all the counties in the United States in terms of the percentage of the total personal income that came from social security. The highest was in St. Petersburg, Florida. And when I walked into the bank, I was informed that as a college professor with a munificent salary -- it was five thousand and something dollars -- that I had an automatic 250 dollar overdraft. I have never before or since had an overdraft at a bank or wanted one, and I never used it. But it's sort of an indication of the difference that one with a five thousand dollar income in 1960, right on the eve of John F. Kennedy... let me strike that. Kennedy was already President by the time I got there.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.