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And then, yeah, getting used to not knowing anyone. The one person I knew was a person from church, so she was a little older, and she says to me -- because we got together a couple days later. She goes, "Oh, there's a person I'd like you to meet." So she introduced me to Yvonne. And she told Yvonne, "Oh, there's this guy coming up from L.A. that you should meet," so we kind of met. We didn't like each other particularly, she was very conservative. She just finished serving as a Goldwater Golden Girl at the Republication National Convention in Oakland. And so was a very conservative woman, she went to this conservative church, that you couldn't drink Coke, you had to wear skirts below the knee, all those kinds of things. But yeah, I found her interesting. And so that was kind of... but I was a math major just going through life not knowing what I was doing. And then the Free Speech Movement happened, and then that changed my life. It just, I don't know, the lightbulb turned on when I was just going through life as a student. And then with the strike happening, the first time I walked past these picket lines into a class, and about half the students were missing and the TA was gone, so we left. And I was trying to figure out, you know, I got called names for walking across. And so then I decided, well, let's find out why this is happening. So then I joined the lines, and there was a time when, as a student, all of a sudden you felt this sense of empowerment and engaging with students on these issues. And yeah, I just kind of came to life at that point, changed my major, became much more outspoken and finding things to get involved in. It was just a total turnaround from who I was. So, yeah, that summer when I returned, most of my friends were, "Who is this guy?" I was just spouting off all these things and getting involved in this and that. So the people that didn't like it thought I became typically radicalized at Berkeley, but I said, "Yeah." And so that's where I  transitioned to kind of a much more activist mentality.

BN: And then you changed your major to...

AN: Political science. And it was tough, because I was not prepared academically. And in those classes, in the sections, we'd have conversations, and I was just blown away by the level of conversation, and I just didn't know stuff. So the summer after my first year at Berkeley, I have a book of classics, this list, so I worked at a hamburger stand at night and then during the day I'd be reading. Went through the Harvard Classics, War and Peace, so just read like forty books to try to become, quote, "well-read," and nothing stuck with me. But I started getting much more engaged in classes and conversations and much more confident in what was going on. Yeah, it was just a great time for me personally in terms of my maturation and development, to just be in an environment of so much activism and different people thinking about different ideas. Yeah, it was a great time.

BN: Did your parents have any reaction to this?

AN: They didn't know what was going on. We didn't talk about... they just wanted me to graduate, and they couldn't care less, and I was pretty much on my own financially. So they really were not engaged in these things. High school they asked, "Why did you change your major?" and they didn't know what my major was anyway. So it was very different. My parents had great expectations for my sister, because she was pretty smart and did all the right things. They had very little expectations for me in terms of what to do, etcetera, so there was no pressure. But there was also no, really no engagement about any of those things.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.