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BN: And then I wanted to actually now go back to Berkeley. I'm not familiar with Euclid Hall, the significance of that.

FS: Oh, well, it's very well-known. [Laughs] Euclid Hall is strictly a men's hall at University of California Berkeley. And I forgot how many people it housed, but my guess would be at least a couple dozen. But it was, in a way,  a social club, too, if you want to call it that. We had dances there at Euclid Hall. It was a boarding place for Japanese, primarily. And it functioned as a social center, too, so it's sort of known that way. But it produced some fairly successful people. I only had a year there, too, made several close friends.

BN: So was it already established by the time you went there?

FS: Yeah.

BN: Is it a postwar thing or did it exist even before?

FS: It might have existed before. I've forgotten the history. Yeah, we even had a reunion in the '50s -- or I don't know when the last reunion was. But I think it was one of those places that brought together many of us guys.

BT: So it was established only for Asians?

FS: For Japanese.

BT: For Japanese?

FS: It was Japanese food, we had a Japanese cook there that was paid for by our costs, and there was a house, what do they call that? Older guy that was responsible and then he had an assistant. The assistant was a guy that was active in the Buddhist church up here, I forgot his name now. One of the... at least when I was there. And it was very tight-knit. Well, people like Bob Suzuki, who became president of Cal Poly, he's a product of Euclid Hall.

BT: So that was established, obviously, to segregate Japanese Americans from the rest of...

FS: I think to provide a home base, so it must have been from before the war. I don't recall exactly. I think the building was owned by the Japanese community, I mean, it was bought for that purpose. There wasn't too many housing options that was kind of the place to go to.

BN: And it was all, this was all men, right?

FS: Yeah, all men.

BN: Was there an equivalent for women?

FS: Any what?

BN: Was there an equivalent thing for the women students?

FS: Well, there was a place around the corner which many of the Asian women, I know Marian's sister stayed. I forgot the name of the hall, but it was a hall in which many women... I don't know if it was primarily for Japanese girls or not, but it was very close to campus, one block from the edge of the campus and very convenient.

BN: And you were only there for a year, you said, right?

FS: Yeah.

BN: Was that a matter of the education side?

FS: Well, okay. I went there to go to college, right, for the first time. I mean, I didn't think of PCC as a college. I was accepted, I had the units and things. Fortunately, I had things like calculus at PCC, I didn't have to take it again at Cal where it would have been tough. I think... well, I left in a way. At that time, the Vietnam War was pretty --

BN: Korean.

FS: The Korean War was hot and heavy. And we used to talk about that. Some of my friends, we played a lot of basketball. We won a championship up north with our basketball team, it was called San Lorenzo Seraphs, and Harry Kawahara, who was now down here, it was his family that sponsored it. Kind of forgot where I was going with that whole thing. Harry was at Euclid and some of the other basketball guys. One of the guys actually, he and I played ball together and we went into, we used to talk into the night about the war, we were struggling with whether to join or to get drafted or that kind of stuff. He ended up being a bird colonel, lifetime, in the military. I think for me what happened is the school of architecture weighed heavy. It was called the Beaux Arts School at that time, and it had to do with European architecture. I couldn't fit, I couldn't relate to the Gothic and all the different Greek stuff that we had to learn and memorize. And all we did at school was to measure all that stuff on campus that had all these European details and things, and then we'd have to draw it and spend all night drawing these things in what we called stippling. We used to use a pen, that was part of the discipline of being an architect. You keep putting little dots to make shapes and forms until your eyes go blind. And they put a microscope, a magnifying thing on there and see how perfect the dot is with the ink, and you get graded on that. Anyway, I didn't fit, and it wasn't my calling to be, to pursue that type of stuff. So I think for me to leave, which was, I think I left about a month or less before the fiscal year, we had those options, and then allowed the draft to take me, and I was drafted into the army. So the Berkeley Beaux Arts school was not my calling. When I look back at the book that we had to read and try to memorize, because architectural history is part of the seven part exam we take as licensed architects. And at that time that I was going to take my exam, it was still using that stuff, all the great cathedrals of Europe. Not being a bookworm type of guy, that was a little bit beyond me. I mean, I didn't fail, but I didn't enjoy it, it wasn't my fit.

BN: And then you were drafted right after that?

FS: I was drafted, yeah, that summer.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.