<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Next I want to go to one of the things that was a... the best way to describe it, it made a delightful surprise for me at Densho was when you relocated to Bellevue, Washington.

RD: No, don't use that term.

TI: Not relocated. You moved.

RD: Yes, I migrated.

TI: You migrated, you came to Bellevue, Washington, from Cincinnati. And I just wanted to ask you, so why did you come to Bellevue?

RD: It had nothing to do with Densho.

TI: [Laughs] I understand.

RD: Although Densho has been important once I came here. No, it's very simple; you know the answer. My daughter and her husband live here and are employed here, and our only two grandchildren are their children. And if we want to see them otherwise, it's hard to see people in Seattle if you're in Cincinnati. So we came out here. In some ways it was a diminution of some things that I had come to rely on. Most of my support system was gone. We'd lived in Cincinnati thirty years.

TI: So a support system like University of Cincinnati?

RD: Yes, but more than that. I mean, when you spend thirty years in an institution like University of Cincinnati, most of whom's undergraduate students come from that region, and you teach very, very large classes and are a fairly conspicuous figure on campus, everywhere you go, people know who you are. You develop a lot of friendships, some animosities. And here I'm largely anonymous. There are some advantages to anonymity, but not many.

TI: But how is that for you, to go from a place where you're really well-known to a place where, yeah, you'd walk the streets of Bellevue and no one would know? I notice that because in my field you are so prominent, so I just expect people to know who you are.

RD: Well, in Cincinnati a lot of people know who I am still. But any move you make, anything you do, has pluses and minuses. So that was a minus. A big plus was, of course, there are some institutions, including particularly Densho out here that are very influential and useful and being able to work with Densho and be supported by them, by you, by it... what is it? What's the proper pronoun reference? "It," I guess. That's it, and of course, in the final analysis, blood is thicker than water. But some of my life blood is still in Cincinnati. But it's been different. The one clear advantage, apart from Densho, of living in Bellevue, when I get up and look at the papers, all the results are in.

TI: Meaning what? I'm not quite sure I understand.

RD: Scores. The games are over.

TI: Oh, I see. It's West Coast. But in this day and age of the internet, if you're in Cincinnati, you could wake up and get all the scores.

RD: Oh, yes, you can get them, but they're in the paper that's at your doorstep. One of the papers at your doorstep, because the New York Times you get outside of New York goes to bed at ten o'clock.

TI: So what else do you miss from Cincinnati?

RD: I miss the music culture. Most of the chamber music here takes place in summer festivals outdoors. And listening to chamber music outdoors with the crows and the helicopters and everything else, is not my idea of fun, and I'm very, very fond of chamber music, so is my wife. Cincinnati is a lot closer to a lot of places I want to go to than Seattle is. When I was working in Cincinnati, if there was something I needed in Washington, I could take a plane in the morning, an early plane, get to the archives or the Library of Congress before it opened, be there for the opening day, get a day's work in, get home and sleep in my own bed. It was easy to get to New York, etcetera, and a little easier to get to Europe. Not much, but a little. So there was that. I certainly don't miss August in Cincinnati. August for me was APC, Any Place but Cincinnati, because it is just awful. You come out of the library at three or four o'clock in the afternoon and your glasses steam up and it is hot. River towns, I was once at a baseball game in St. Louis, and in the seventh inning, the announcer says, "The temperature on field is now below a hundred," and it was a night game. If you haven't been in that kind of Midwestern heat, you just don't know what it's like. I have a lot of friends in Cincinnati, although some of them are dying now like my friends everywhere. And it was just a place that we had become very, very comfortable in. It was a strange place with its own particular tribal customs that you had to get used to. But every place has its own... that's not true, some places don't have enough of an identity to have tribal customs, but Cincinnati does, and the Seattle area certainly does. I still don't understand some of the tribal customs here. But in terms of my career, in its latter phases, with one exception, it's been a good place to be.

TI: And what's the exception? What was the project or the publication that was hard to do while you were in Seattle?

RD: It wasn't hard to do, but it certainly was no easier to do because of the... no, it was harder to do. Because it was a large work on Franklin Roosevelt, much of what was written here. I needed regular and frequent access to a big library, and there's one here, but getting from Bellevue to the library is not easy, and then the library and the whole campus is blatantly in violation of the access laws, federal access laws. They get away with murder here, I don't know how they do it. I know that we had to spend all kinds of money in Cincinnati to make the campus fully accessible. That campus is not fully accessible.

TI: And you're talking about the University of Washington?

RD: University of Washington. There's no way to get easily from a bus to the library unless somebody drives you. You can't just take the bus and get to the library with a great deal of ease. So that was more difficult.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.