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BN: And then after you got your -- this is a PhD, right?

KS: Yeah.

BN: And then after that is when you moved to California.

KS: Then I got a job at General Dynamics, and then I worked, they had a plant in Pomona. See, General Dynamics had a plant in San Diego, and then in 1952 they decided to start a missile division at Pomona. So the plant was built by the U.S. Navy, and then in 1952 the U.S. Navy wanted a location that would be far away from the coast so that when the Japanese battleship came to Long Beach and started shooting, it couldn't get to Pomona. So they put the plant in Pomona. And it was the same thing in 1952, the Air Force wanted a plant for making missiles, and they wanted it away from the ocean so when the Japanese aircraft carriers came and launched their plane, it'd be a one-way trip to Tucson. So then both plants were built in 1952, so that Japanese couldn't attack them. So I got a job at General Dynamics Pomona, and we built missiles.

BN: Being that you're of Japanese ancestry, was that ever an issue in terms of discrimination or anything like that, did you feel?

KS: No, I remember once when I was working, there was a new hire, and the new hire asked -- it was a Jewish guy -- and asked another Jewish guy, "Is there discrimination against Jews?" And the answer was that you had to negotiate, work with the Navy, and he thought there might be discrimination there. But the way it was at General Dynamics was that I was a supervisor, so I had about thirty or forty engineers working for me. And then my immediate supervisor was also Japanese, and then over there, the VP of Engineering was a Chinese guy. So I don't think there was any discrimination against Asians. I think the main thing is myself and my immediate supervisor were what you called "quiet Americans," so I think that hindered our progress.

BN: You weren't assertive.

KS: But I was in charge, so I was a supervisor for ten years or so. So I was in what they called the Dynamics Department, and our job was to evaluate the performance of the missile. So we had a lot of simulation, computer simulations. So a long time ago they used to have what they call analog simulation, that's before the digital computers came about. So that people that worked for me had to run the analog simulation. So we used to have two shifts and stuff like that. But I thought I did okay at General Dynamics. And then we were bought out by Hughes, and then Hughes said they're going to send the whole operation from California to Tucson, so that's the missile division of Hughes, which was in Canoga Park. And then the people in San Diego, GD San Diego they're making Tomahawk missile, then us guys in Pomona closed shop and then moved to Tucson. So that time, I used to get notice from my supervisor how many people I have to lay off every month as they closed. So that was my painful job, to tell people that they don't have a job anymore.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.