<Begin Segment 14>

LT: So you went to college, and you eventually transferred to UCLA, and what was your major and how did you become involved in other activities?

GI: Well, my roommate in Long Beach was Fred Miller, who was a master's degree graduate student in philosophy at Long Beach State. And he saw that I liked to read, so he gave me Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. And in the preface to that, or introduction to that book, Russell says, well, there's a lot of controversy about why should we bother studying philosophy anyway, what use is it to anyone? And he said, well, if there's any use to philosophy, it's to help the individual know their place in the world and what they should be doing. And coming back from Japan having no idea what I was supposed to do, having spent my teenage years as a surfer and hot rodder and drunkard, I majored in philosophy and comparative religion in community college. And then when I transferred, I started out as a philosophy major, but I didn't know the program where you're supposed to specialize in one type of philosophy, and then the next quarter, that branches out into three classes and so on. So by the second quarter, I had to take at least six classes just to keep up with the tracks that I was already on. So I reflected back to what Russell had said, and I thought, "What am I missing here?" And then I recalled my father's tutoring me on finance and economics with the Wall Street Journal, and my mother talking about how she did all of her training and all that sort of thing. So I thought, well, maybe economics would be a good thing for me to study. So I changed to economics and I also minored in mathematics and Japanese.

LT: At UCLA you also became involved in the Asian Coalition. What was your role and how did you expand that?

GI: Well, I was already twenty-four years old, so I'm kind of like the old man in the school, right? You had all these kids running around that don't know anything. I mean, I had already been through all of this stuff in the world, so I would go over to the Asian Studies Center and just read the periodicals there. And one day, a whole gaggle of students, kids came up and said, "Hey, you're Gary Itano, right?" I go, "Yeah, why are you asking?" "Well, we're from the Asian Coalition, and our director had to drop out of school. We were told that you might be a good person to be our director." And I'm thinking, "Where did they get this idea?" I didn't know that it was Warren Furutani who put them up to this, and the reason I think...

LT: And Warren Furutani is?

GI: Warren Furutani is, like, he was a past state legislator and L.A. city council person or supervisor or something like that. So he was a community leader, and he was one of the heads of the Asian Studies Center at the time, and he had started the LEAP program, Leadership Education Advancement Program or something like that. So he knew of me through my anti-war activities, and in particular, I had gone with him to the second Manzanar pilgrimage. And I happened to be down in Little Tokyo trying to cover a story for the Long Beach Free Press, and there was this lady there and she goes, "Hey, shouldn't you be getting on the bus now?" I said, "Well, I'm just down here, I heard about this, and I just want it covered for my paper." And she goes, "Well, why don't you ride with us?" And so I said, "Okay," and it turned out to be Sue Embrey, the leader of the whole thing. And so she sat in the back, and she had this box of memorabilia from her Manzanar days and she had me go through them and she would explain the whole thing about the whole movement and that sort of thing. And at the end ceremonies, it was very cold, windy and dusty. We all gathered around the monument and took a photo. And so if you go to Manzanar and go into the back where they had the pilgrimage exhibit, there's a photo thing, book about the pilgrimage. And about two pages in, you'll see the picture, and I'm the long-haired, bearded hippie on the far right of that picture. So I'm kind of like, deep into this activism, and so I think that's why Warren had these kids finger me. And it was funny because the night before, I had just watched one of the old George Raft, he's kind of like a counterpart to Humphrey Bogart who's more famous. But I remember George Raft because my father, in his part time job, told me he was a bartender in Hollywood. And one of his customers was this actor George Raft. So whenever George Raft came on TV, I would watch his movies. And the story was about these gangsters who were negotiating some sort of alcohol smuggling thing, and George Raft goes to his counterpart and goes, "Okay, so why should I take this deal? What's in it for me?" And so when these kids asked me to be the director, this thing popped in my head and I go, well, so what's in it for me? And one of the kids jumps up in the back and he goes, "There's a ninety-eight dollar stipend?" And I go, well, ninety-eight dollars, that's not going to take you very far. And, "No, it's monthly, monthly." And I think, and I'm working down in the UCLA medical center pathology department developing their electromicrographs, and I could use the spare change. So I go, "Okay." So I ended up being the director of Asian Coalition for the remaining time I was there.

LT: You also formed another coalition when you were director.

GI: Yeah, it just stuck in my mind that I had heard, since I had got back from Japan, that the division that my father was in in Alabama was called the Rainbow Division because all the different races and things were just piled together. And so, for some reason, that notion just appealed to me. And I was already accustomed, I grew up in a black community and I was very, I felt very close to indigenous peoples, because I saw a lot of parallels in their cultures to the Japanese cultures, and they really are. And then the Latino community, so we all grouped together in this Rainbow Coalition. And I remember we had to go before the student body council to propose, argue for our budget, I guess they were in charge of getting it approved. And these guys were kind of jerks, they were like Greeks and crazy irresponsible people. But we had to go before, we were holding to these guys, and I remember the day that we were to appear for them, the student body council was so intimidated by these third-world guys that they got a whole, like, eleven sheriffs to protect them from us, like we were going to, I don't know, assault them or some crazy thing like that. And so I got in front and I started to run down our programs. [Coughs] Excuse me. I started running down our program and why we needed the money and that sort of thing, it's very straightforward.

LT: Were you successful?

GI: Yeah.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.