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TI: Backing up just a little bit, how did the death of Roosevelt affect you? Do you know where that, when you heard about that?

RD: Oh, yeah, very much, very much, very much. I was very depressed, I had no knowledge of Truman, didn't think much of him. I think we probably have a postwar reaction, and that it shouldn't be a depression. So I was very depressed. By that time, victory was pretty well assured, we didn't know anything about the atomic bomb. The war with Japan everybody thought would last a lot longer than it actually did. Anyway, longshore work wasn't anything I could do, there was very little work in San Francisco, there was a recession generally. And for a variety of personal reasons, I was to leave there, and I looked at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and discovered that there were two labor markets in the United States in which there was a job surplus, more jobs than there were people. Those were in Dallas and Houston. I didn't know anybody in either, but I flipped the coin and it came out Houston, so I hitchhiked there, got jobs, mostly in restaurants, started out as a dishwasher and soon wound up as a manager, a night manager, and I could go to school. Entered the University of Houston, didn't intend to stay there at all. It wasn't a very good school then, it was a private school, it was expensive. But Texas, which we think of as not having much progressive legislation, had a very, very good junior college aid program. I'd been in Texas for a year before I started school, so I was eligible for it. So they paid, the State of Texas paid most of my tuition for the first two years. Not all of it, but most of it. My intention was to go to a better school, perhaps back to Berkeley, where I'd never entered officially. But it turned out that there were a lot of bright young PhDs, not a hell of a lot older than I was... they were older, but not much. And they had very few serious students, so I got a great deal of attention. I could go in and talk to people, I went out and after a while I'm drinking beer with some of them, etcetera, and I'm getting, I understand, a very, very good education. So I stay there and do very well.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.