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BN: Anyway, one thing I want to ask is -- and this is kind of, one of the quintessential Sansei experiences is that they're parents didn't tell them about camp or about what happened. How, did your parents talk about that stuff?

LH: No. In fact, "camp" is a coded word, right? So those New Year's and Thanksgivings when everybody would get together, the question was, "What camp did you go to?" We had no idea what "camp" was. And, of course, we didn't know that until we were older and we're like, "Tell us about camp." And my parents just clammed up. They did not want to talk about camp. In the beginning of the whole redress movement, they did not want to talk about it.

BN: Even later they didn't talk about it?

LH: Later they were better. They actually got, like a lot of Niseis that got into the movement, they realized it was probably okay to talk about it and they really needed to right this wrong.

BN: But that was later.

LH: Later, yeah.

BN: And then you mentioned your uncle was one of the activists in Seattle, too.

LH: Yeah, yeah. And my father was really involved in redress. He did a lot of work on redress.

BN: Okay, we'll definitely get back to that. So, okay, you graduate high school and then you go on to University of Colorado.

LH: No, I had the most checkered past for my undergraduate.

BN: So you took a convoluted path there.

LH: Uh-huh, super convoluted. So just as a preview, so my life is very non-normative in many ways, and my undergraduate is a very good example. I went to a different college every year. So I started out at Knox College, and I realized it was like, everything was flat.

BN: Where is Knox College?

LH: In Illinois, Galesburg, Illinois.

BN: Why did you...

LH: I just... that was where I had no clue what I was supposed to do for going to college. You'd think my parents would have, like, schooled me on it. And I was in advanced placement, but then I didn't have that high of a GPA, I had a 3.3 or something like that. And then they didn't give you extra credit for being in the AP, and, of course, I was competing with those extra people. So if I'd gone to another school or just on the regular program, I probably could have gotten into a pretty good school, but I was in the AP classes with these people that were, like, super smart. And so I ended up at Knox College, because I could hit the mid-level liberal colleges, and I knew nothing about Knox College, I just wanted to get away from home. I didn't want to be close to home. [Laughs] So I went to Knox College and I got there and I realized... I had a great time there, I mean, I met Erica Overberger and we did a lot of stuff. I ended up going to New York City and visiting with her family and finding out Beats and White House Bar and all this stuff. My freshman year was like, first I was barred from the sororities because they found out about my rebelliousness in my high school sorority. And then, which I didn't really care about that much. And I was dating a Jewish guy who was also very rambunctious. And we'd do things like, when we went to see Irma la Douce I would wear green stockings. And we'd go into the upper gallery because it was a segregated movie house. And then... anyway, I had a lot of fun, and I also broke all the rules because we had... you may not remember this, but we had hours that we had to go, for women, we had women's hours. We had to be in the dorm and we could not go out of the dorm after ten o'clock. So we couldn't be in the library. They library would be open, we couldn't stay in the library, we had to go back to the dorm, which I found outrageous, so I took to going down the fire escape. [Laughs] And the authorities only found out about this hearsay, they never caught me, and hanging out with my friend in the fraternity. And so then we had this big rebellion that year, it was unheard of. And for some reason they thought I was the middle of that, I wasn't. I was just sort of going along with everybody else. And we encircled the administration building, like, holding hands and protesting women's hours and these other things that just, and the war in whatever, I can't remember. That was the year that Kennedy was shot.

BN: Oh, right.

LH: It was a big political shift change, and even at this small liberal arts school. So I got called in and I was told I could not come back, so I had to find another school. And basically expelled, but they couldn't tell me why I was expelled because they didn't have, they didn't know any of it. And I wasn't part of that, they thought I was part of the leading, the cheerleader for that movement, but I wasn't. I can't even remember who was. So, I thought, okay, I got to find another -- so I applied to Colorado College, which was closer to home, and closer to mountains because I was in... I was like, when I got to Galesburg, I was like, I think the highest rise in elevation is from the street to the curb, that was it.

And so I was sent to Colorado College, and there I met this fabulous group of friends that I've had for a long, long time, they're just amazing. We were quite a bit early, sort of Beat movement, early hippie movement. And, of course, these were all white people, that's all I knew from the time I was, like, growing up. Through this period, everybody was white, but really intellectually interesting people. We did drugs, but I was not into drugs too much because I didn't like them taking over my head. But we did it in a completely different way than kids do it now. So we read Aldous Huxley and Ginsberg, and we read all of the culture. We found out everything about LSD that we could. So we had one guy who was going to law school so he did the law, and one guy who was, like, doing medicine, so he did all the medical things. And then we had other literature people that were like, we were doing all the happenings. [Laughs] But it was very studied, so we went on a trip, you had a group that was not taking the drugs, and a group that was. And so I was basically with the people that would, like, shepherd the people that were on the drugs. And we tried everything because that was what we wanted to do. It was interesting, that's what was happening in California, we wanted to be like the California movements. That was a very interesting group of people.

BN: It sounds like it.

LH: In fact, Ken Kesey was the one that introduced it to us, because he came through and gave a lecture. And then he was staying at the Broadmoor, so my friends found him at the Broadmoor. In fact, they asked us to go out, sneak out of the dorm in order to go and I didn't go. So the next day we got this report of him passing around the, passing around a joint to everybody, and that's when they first figured out what marijuana was. It was mostly the guys, I think there was one girl that snuck out of the dorm. But then what happened? Oh, I nearly got thrown out of Colorado College, too, because one night I got caught outside the dorm after hours. And my friend, Perry Lee, we would hang out with Gilbert, her friend Gilbert and we'd climb out the bottom window. But I told him I was up on the roof, and one of the administration said, "Oh, that was the only place I didn't look," and I was like, "Ah, home free." So I didn't get punished, but Perry did, because I actually went out to find her, because I'd left her at this party and she was really drunk, and I thought, "Oh, better go out and get her." And I couldn't get her to come back, so I ended up staying with a friend, and then interrogated the next morning, and she was on probation, actually. I didn't get on probation because they didn't find me because I was upon on the roof. [Laughs]

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