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PW: So from Oakland High, you graduated, and which college did you apply to? Did you apply to more than one college, and then which one did you go to?

EH: No, I only applied to one, and that was UC Berkeley. And I got accepted there, so that's where I went. My second choice was going to be -- because financially, I didn't think that we could afford any other university. So if I didn't get into that, I was going to go to junior college, and there were several in the Oakland area that I could have attended. But the main reason was this way I could live at home, because driving from Oakland to Berkeley is not a problem, and I did that for the first year. And actually, I had a friend, I met a friend who lived in Alameda who had a car, because I didn't have a car. He would pick me up every day and take me home every day, so that worked out very well.

PW: Your parents were, and your family still lived in East Oakland?

EH: Yes.

PW: So tell me what it was like for you to step onto campus at Cal. At this point, it's what year when you started college?

EH: Yeah, I graduated high school in 1956, so this was in the fall of 1956. So I spent two years there at Berkeley. And I developed a whole new group of friends, almost all of them were Japanese Americans. There was a boarding house right near Berkeley that was run by a Japanese Buddhist, a priest. And he had a lot of boys living there it's almost like a boarding house. Because I think his mother, his wife used to cook every day for the kids. So we used to go there after school and hang out before we went home. And then I met guys that were in the same classes that I was taking. It was mostly, kind of pre-med kind of classes. And those were the kids that I met, studied with and played with. But I had no interest in going into the medical field or the dental field. A lot of my friends were thinking about that. But then I decided maybe a pharmacy would be a good field for me or optometry, because those were kind of medical also, and different kind of focus. So I applied to the pharmacy school and I got accepted. So after... you only need to go to two years of pre-pharmacy, and then you can go to the pharmacy, start the pharmacy school, so that's what I did.

PW: Which school, where was that?

EH: So that was at UC San Francisco, at the med center in San Francisco. So then that's why I only stayed two years at Berkeley. In retrospect, I think I should have stayed longer because there was a lot of courses that I would have liked to have taken, but I didn't because you had to take all the pre-pharmacy courses, or the pre-medical courses. So I never got to take some of the more interesting arts and kinds of studies that I never got a chance to take. But at the time, I was thinking more about graduating and getting a job and making some money, so that's what I did.

PW: Were you part of any clubs or social groups beyond just your informal friend groups when you were at Cal?

EH: At Cal, no. I never joined any groups.

PW: And again, what would your friends, you and your friends do as activities? You're kind of free from your family, you're out of their sight for the first time.

EH: Mostly it involved activities at school, like going to sports games, football or basketball. I liked to watch track meets. And then there were some social things, dances and things in the area that we would go to. But that was about it, most of the time was spent studying, so a lot of time at the library, things like that.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.