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LH: So then Colorado College was this really great adventure. So the next year I decided I was going to leave college, I was quitting college, I was going to go do something else.

BN: What was your major or...

LH: Oh, god, I was so stupid. It was like the Science of Philosophy, or Philosophy of Science, sorry. I had no idea what I was doing. [Laughs]

BN: You were having a good time.

LH: Then we started making fun of it, oh, the absolute beautiful, this is the absolute... but I really didn't know what I was doing. I had a fairly good education, but I didn't know what I was doing, so it was time to drop out of school, which totally freaked out my parents, of course, right? Because I had paid for part of it. I was working as a cook during the summer for mountain climbing expeditions and so I could pay for part of my school, but they were paying the rest of it. So then I was working during the summer, they were regular Nisei, like you have to work. So I decided I was not going to go back to school and then we made this deal that they would pay for part of a year in Europe if, when I came back, I paid for the rest of my schooling. And so then I worked that summer and paid for part of it and I went off to Italy, which I only chose because I was really undirected in a lot of ways. I was just experimenting and having fun and just like everybody had had a European trip, right, of my friends, which were, they were fairly well-to-do, affluent, wealthy, they had more [inaudible] than I did, certainly. So I wanted to go to Europe, and also, all my teaching and learning, I mean, all my learning was about Europe. I was in that mode, so I chose Italy because I wanted to go to a country where I didn't speak the language, because I already spoke French. But everybody was going to Paris and I thought, I didn't want to do that, I just wanted to go to someplace that's completely new. And Italy in the '60s was a really interesting place because they were still recovering from the war. A lot of tradition in place and structure in place still. It was really interesting. So I went to the... it was Scuola Per Stranieri. It was this project that they had created to teach foreigners Italian, it was really effective. So you could learn Italian in two months, I was fairly fluent, you could learn it really fast. And then I did a program with Syracuse University for another semester where I got really fun literature classes and things like that. I can't remember... I went to the academy for a while, but that didn't really last. I was interested in art. Of course, art history, it was a fabulous place to be, traveled all over Italy with friends. We actually hitchhiked some of the way and trains were really great. That was one of the most important, probably, educational experiences of my life was that trip to Italy and studying there.

BN: So this is after, kind of, two years of college and this is like...

LH: Junior year.

BN: '65-ish?

LH: Yeah, sixty-five, sixty-six. And I had my first love there, Giuseppe Martorana, who wooed me. And he was a medical student and so I got to... I basically was only around Italians the whole time. And I didn't have very non-Italian friends because I was with Beppe most of the time and he was a Florentine, so to speak. His family was originally from Sicily, which I didn't understand at the time, but his friends were old-time Florentines. Even some of them were even the aristocratic Florentines, so I ended up in these villas occasionally. That was my youth, right?

BN: In the '60s.

LH: And it was before the flood, so I got to see Cimabue and Giottos and all of them before they were damaged by the flood.

BN: So were you developing more of an academic interest in art through this?

LH: Yeah. And I drew and things like that. Okay, we get to my fourth year. [Laughs] My fourth year at the university of my undergraduate was at the University of Colorado.

BN: And back?

LH: And back, that's all I can afford, right? Anyway, that was a long story so I ended up in the University of Colorado in the art program.

BN: And you did eventually graduate from...

LH: Did manage to graduate. [Laughs] So I guess that was a really odd start to life. But very... the only recognition that I had of being different was, like, I remember getting up once in the morning and looking at the mirror, and I'm like, "I'm really different. Nobody's talking about it, but I am really different, so I just eventually have to figure this out." And I actually did a paper on the incarceration when I was at Knox College for my history program. I was curious about it, you know, and I had some identification with it, but not a lot. No recognition of how different I really was. And a lot of my friends didn't really treat me as that different, right? But I think it was the dating thing that was really different.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.