<Begin Segment 19>

BN: And then did that then play a role in your academic track, too?

LH: Well, I don't know. I have maybe three main tracks. I'm really a community activist from way back. So right after the Family Album exhibit part sort of fell down, I moved to West Oakland. I was living, my husband at the time was Edward Kikumoto, I met him at JCCC. And he was an exhibit preparer and he actually refitted this warehouse for us to live in for a while. It was fabulous, right? But we decided we had to buy, so we bought in West Oakland in 1989. So we lived there for, that's the house I'm selling now. Sadly, I love the house. But, so I got involved, Madeline Wells got me involved in the historic preservation project fighting to try to save the church after the 1989 earthquake, and I got really involved in Oakland, activism for West Oakland. At the same time doing all this other, working full time doing this, that's sort of been my life. I've had to juggle a lot of things because I never had a lot of resources. So I never really had money but I'd figure out how to pay for things, how to get things moving, how to do things. So community activism is a really big component. So what happened with the PhD is I didn't start my PhD until I was fifty. Because I was doing this cultural research stuff and getting really frustrated because it took forever to get it reviewed if we had to send it to the cultural resource people. I thought, "I can do this." So I went and got, worked with David Gebhardt at UCSB who I knew from my master's degree. And really got involved in doing architectural history, that's when I really began to really love looking at houses, figuring out what architects did, really writing about 19th century urbanism and, well, that particular moment in architecture from around 1879 through 1920. And working with David Gebhardt who was really the premier architectural historian, he was the California architectural historian. Because I knew I had to go there, because if I'm going to get the permission from the Caltrans people to do this work, I had to get the best kind of recommendation I could for the work. And he was great, so I was looking at my work on Charles F. Whittlesey. It was a (deceased) white architect, male architect. I was doing this monograph on him, basically. And I was looking at it going, "I think this is PhD material, what do you think? This could be my dissertation. He said, "Yep." "Do you think I should apply?" "Yep." So I did. And I went back partly because I kept, I was in these meetings at Caltrans, I'd be the only person of color and the only woman in the room. And I was working with senior engineers because they found out I could write. And this kind of change, it's like twenty years after affirmative action, right? And nothing had changed, this has to change. So I went back incognito, worked on Charles F. Whittlesey, this hagiographic study, this white male architect, center of the field with David Gebhardt who's major in this society of architectural historians, and he dies in the first year I'm at graduate school.

And I committed to one year, I took off school, worked for one year to do that one year for the PhD program. It was really stupid, I mean, who does a PhD program in one year, right? But I did. So for some reason, and I have no idea, I just took three courses at a time because that seemed doable. I didn't realize that by the end of the year I'd finished all my course requirements so I could leave. And so I ended up at Berkeley doing intercampus exchange. But at that point, I was actually doing both projects for some reason. Can't even remember why, but I was doing the confinement sites program, building the confinement sites. I can't even remember exactly how I got into it, but I was carrying two main topics at the time. I can't remember exactly how it happened. Because I started at Berkeley, and of course I had put together another dissertation committee. And it was a disaster at UCSB because nobody wanted to take Gebhardt's students. So I needed two people to be on my committee at UCSB. And fortunately the American art historian took me on, and then one other person sort of stood in for a while. And then Swati Pad who I knew at Berkeley as a graduate student, got the job at UCSB. And so she stood in as my other person at UCSB, I had to have two people there, thankfully, I thank her for that. But she didn't want to have anything to do with my dissertation, which was, I said fine. I'd like to do work with my Berkeley people. So I got to work with, do you know Dell Upton by any chance? Oh, anyways, pretty famous American architectural historian. Worked with him and two other really great people at Berkeley. And that was my core committee with my major advisor at UCSB who knew nothing about my topic or architecture. Architectural history was not [inaudible].

But that really worked out. I had this amazing... I had an amazing group of peers at Berkeley. So we, there are probably about twenty, at least twenty major scholars that came out of Berkeley in architectural history at that time, and so we all still really worked together. So my last book was with Anoma Pieris, University of Melbourne, we cowrote a book. So I did one and a half chapters in the book and then we co-wrote the introduction and then framed the whole book. So that just came out with Cambridge University Press this April, I mean last month, February it came out, you can get it on the table. So that was... Berkeley is my intellectual home. I love it, I love my colleagues, and I have wonderful colleagues, really.

BN: Then you have another one forthcoming, right?

LH: Hopefully. University of Washington Press just wrote me and said, like, "What are you doing?" [Laughs] It's like, oh yeah, that book. So hopefully beginning in June, May, well maybe June I'll be able to really start working on that. I'll have a lot of things off my plate, and then I take on no more commitments to anything. I have two publications I committed to, of course, my wonderful colleagues. One on race and architecture and then another one, No Small Acts, which is being edited by Ana Maria, who's a wonderful scholar at the University of Michigan that I love, (now Harvard), so I said yes to that. And then I'm not taking on any other commitments and it'll just be the book. But it's probably two years off, because it takes so much to put it together.

BN: And then it's easy to say you'll take no more commitments, but hard to actually...

LH: No, I can't. I absolutely cannot. This time... I mean, that's what happened along the way. You know, a set of essays and another book, this is like, I can't do it. I can't do it again, that's it.

BN: I won't ask you for anything then.

LH: [Laughs]

BN: I was going to.

LH: Well, I'm going to try to will you in on the Cooper Hiram Project for Asian American Architecture because we need to know about archives.

BN: There's a couple things I want to ask you about, too, but it can wait, there's no rush. Well, we should probably start wrapping up because I have someone else coming in at twelve. There's other things I want to ask you about, but we can do this off camera.

LH: Okay.

BN: But yeah, thank you, that was terrific. We haven't done many Sansei and we're starting do that, so this is great. So thank you very much.

LH: I'm totally honored, totally honored.

BN: We may want to do another part to talk about your academic work later on, but there's time for that.

LH: So I'll just cap this.

BN: Sure.

LH: Okay. So I would just say for people who are watching, if you want to go back to school, you can go back to school at fifty and get your PhD when you're sixty, and it's a lot of fun. And I actually got my degree on my sixtieth birthday, so my degree actually says, "June 10, 2005," Which was my sixtieth birthday.

BN: Wow. That's great, thank you. We share the same birthday, by the way.

LH: Our same birthday, June 10th?

BN: June 10th.

LH: Oh, my good. So the sixtieth is, like, a really important birthday, right? So that was amazing that I could do that. So I say that to everybody who's thinking about what, maybe exploring other things, you can do that late in life and it can be a lot of fun. And I serve as a model, that I (just) realized that I serve as a model for other people.

BN: Your mom sort of did that, too, right? She also got a PhD.

LH: She got an EDD from Northern Colorado State fairly late. Not too late in life, but fairly late in life, midlife.

BN: Later than is typical, though.

LH: Yeah, right, she went back to school. She did that, too, Mom did that.

BN: Yeah, so thank you.

LH: Thank you, yeah.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.