<Begin Segment 12>

BN: So then you graduated from Loyola High School.

AK: Go out to Loyola U.

BN: Where is Loyola U? Is that...

AK: It's LMU.

BN: LMU now, okay. I wasn't sure about that, okay.

AK: Well, I went there, I could have gone to SC. I went to SC for grad school, I was also accepted at Marquette, but I didn't want to go where it was that cold and far, so I went to USC. But at Loyola, I was what they call a dayhop, you commute. And if you think about it, that's forty-five minutes of...

BN: Because you're still living in Silver Lake.

AK: Still living in Silver Lake. No freeways, or limited freeways, but there were ways of getting there. So that was a boarder school, so if your board, everybody hangs out together and so forth. So you had to make your own friends. So one of the things you do is you join a fraternity, and so I was in Alpha Delta Gamma, which also had Pat Wayne again and some of these other folks. So I learned what it was like. The thing that gave me a little bit of cache was because I had been taking judo and everything, some of the bullying and things like that. When we were pledging, one of the guys jumped me and I flipped him, he turned white, whiter. And I said, "Don't do that." Then one of these guys -- and I was going to use a curse word that starts with an 'A' -- he came from, he transferred from Denver, Regis College, to Loyola, and he thought he was a big shot. And he kept pushing, pushing, pushing, so I finally just stood up to him and I said, "Let's go behind the gym," and he said, "Yeah." Then as we're walking over there, he said, "Well, what are you thinking?" And I said, "Well, I don't know whether to let you hurt me or I should just kill you." He said, "What?" I said, "Well, because I know self-defense, I can't control myself beyond a certain point if I think I'm in imminent danger, I might have to respond." Because this guy was supposed to be this boxing champ and everything. He said, "Let's think about this later." So after that, he backed off. Like I told those other guys, I said, somebody coming up, and coming like that to me, it's probably okay. But somebody coming from a blind side, all of a sudden you just sort of react and turn, and you find the person on the ground. I was holding him so that he wouldn't hurt himself. You should see the shock on his face, he was one of my fellow pledges, and he was a big guy. But what happened when I was there was Paul Maruyama was an Olympic guy, and he was going to be in the Olympics. And so he wanted to have, there wasn't any place for him to train, so he wanted to spar with different people, so he started a judo club. But he made me sort of like his second, which meant that I have to do the slaughter line. And the slaughter line is you start with the weakest person, and you go to the strongest person, and I'm the guy that's got to beat all these people just to prove that I have what it takes. So we would do this two or three times a week, and these guys are big. But you learn chokeholds and you learn different things. So I wasn't very good, but I survived.

BN: Better than them.

AK: Yeah.

BN: What did you study at Loyola?

AK: Sociology.

BN: Did you have an idea of what you wanted to be?

AK: Well, I started premed, and then I switched to sociology probably in my second year, that type of thing, because of the sciences and some of those other things. And then I did pretty well in my junior and senior year with the sociology professor, so I went from Loyola to USC.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.