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BN: Now, when you were working for Head Start, what happened to your architectural office?

FS: Nothing. There wasn't one. I've always been a one-man shop.

BN: So that just was sort of on hold?

FS: Well, I was working for somebody, so I never really started an office. I didn't make a commitment 'til after my Palos Verdes/Hawaii incident. And so when I was at Head Start, well, I hadn't really said I wanted to start again. I think maybe that was a way that... well, I know I'm always sort of soul searching, and I think the relationship with the headmaster at PO, and I think he empathized. And, of course, Quakers knew about us in camp. Yeah, he introduced me to a Nisei older man, I don't remember his name, but he was one of the more prominent, one of the earlier Nisei. I think he was a banker or something, but I remember meeting him. I didn't really have a practice. I had to develop... it doesn't happen with putting a sign on the wall. It was a studio space that when I went into that transition after Head Start, because the PO, see, that's a kind of elite children's school, certainly was at that time. And I met people that had some money that were involved. One is the lady that eventually ran for the president, she wrote a book, Artist for President. Anyway, she happened to be a senior at Westridge, the same age as me when I was a senior. But anyway, I didn't know her there, I knew her after from PO. And she had property up in the mountains next to this other artist, Zortian, who inherited property up there. So she allowed me to build a little addition to her house, (and) I became a carpenter architect after the Head Start period.

But during the Head Start period, I had a free reign to use my time whatever way, because the airport is back east, well, kind of like here. And it was all based on trust and knowing that I would do something with my time. But as soon as I was called, because they had a project they wanted me to connect with some clients somewhere there, here, there, whatever. There was an institution or some program, I guess, called VOLT that provided all the air tickets, that kind of thing, money for staying at a hotel, whatever. So I did that, and then in between time, I kind of got involved with the Pasadena schools. So there were people that were trying to create open classroom projects, and we got involved there. This one lady at Jefferson School in Pasadena, she was experimenting with something that, she was following this woman who was teaching at UCLA who happens to be Frank Gehry's sister. And she had a theory, wrote some books, and she was working with that kind of experiment. And then Washington schools, Greta Pruit was the principal when I was helping her with whatever. And so I worked in the area by assisting, I know they don't know it, at Sequoia school. But it was a temporary, when they first moved over here, a couple of guys that I knew from PO, they asked if I would join the board there for a short time as they tried to reestablish. You know, Star-News guy writes about all this stuff, but he talks about his grandfather way back or whatever, they don't know. We had this other kind of thing that started there. So I had, you know through circumstances, Betty Williams, who also, she had money, and she was married to this famous kooky artist. They called him kooky because of the way he was, but he was a very fine artist up in the mountains, Altadena. And he was good enough that Saddam Hussein invited him to bring some of his paintings over there to the castle that we bombed up. [Laughs] You know what I mean? The art world and money world, it all runs together.

And so the journey from Head Start back into a so-called practice happened in the Bridge. And the reason I selected that is it allowed me to be totally independent. I could set up a lot of drafting tables, because those days, a drafting table meant bodies. So it looked like it might have ten people there, whatever, that kind of thing, so I could present the image. And when I got into the public sector work, I think the city manager of West Covina, I think he knew Asians and he knew, he was from Northern California and I think he knew about the camp. I think he was very empathetic to them, he knew my dad was an artist because I told him some of the stuff he did. And then he was an artist, too, but he was city manager trying to change the structure of cities. There was a connotation of city administrator was the titles of many cities at that time. So that implied that the city council ran the city. Well, he advocated for city manager so the city manager ran the city. So that's the kind of guy it was. So he turned out to be quite a supporter when I was just starting out. West Covina hired Neptune and Thomas, the company I worked for, stipulating that I have to be assigned to the job, that's unheard of. No architect would put one of the workers on a contract. But so that's kind of been how I evolved back into the Bridge and people like Betty Williams, who by then divorced and gave him the property. And then she moved to Solvang where she had a horse ranch for thoroughbreds, and now it's a winery that's still there. And her daughter, who's still alive, and I still know does a lot of painting. And the reason I know her well, or not well, but she came to the Bridge to, she wanted to go to Japan to study sumi-e, brush painting. So she was going to go for a year, she was Zortien and Betty Williams' daughter. So after Betty died, she inherited the ranch up there, and they'd grow, it's a winery now, and they have wine. And so she'd doing some nice, abstract paintings using sumi and color. So she's successful that way. But yeah, that's a long story to get around, how we started it. It's because like Betty allowed me to do a conceptual design of a small house that she was bringing in a guy that was from Denmark or somewhere, it's a craftsman type, needed a place to live, so she, "Okay, just design a little simple boxed house." So that was a small contract, but it helped me get started, I guess.

BN: So going forward, what would you estimate was like the percentage of work that you did? Was it more public sector work versus private residences?

FS: Mostly public. I had to... I'm one man, and I had to market. So every job, if I can simultaneously do jobs, that was good. But I marketed and then I looked for larger projects so that I could bring in support companies that had enough manpower that would give the impression of a team, but they knew that I was the guy. And so that allowed me to negotiate my way into using my skills, which I was fairly quick at doing, because public sector, there's a limitation, you're not trying to make your ego thing. So you try to solve problems and making sure it came in on budget. So I managed to keep all my clientele out of the headline by doing a job where it runs... when they at least can go overbudget and they still survived. Like police department building here in Pasadena, they brought in, I forgot his name, something Stern or something like that, big time architect. And they were about twenty-five percent overbudget when they built it. They built it because Pasadena's got money, and we are elite. But when I did the fire station here, it was a million bucks or whatever. But you know, got it right on the number, because I couldn't afford to let it run over. I had to do that. I had to do that, and I learned enough by different things, how to make sure I could control the costs. It's not worth taking a gamble, in which guys that become prominent do, but many people have some backing to take a gamble. And a lot of the Niseis, now getting back to the Niseis before the war and after the war, they couldn't do that. They couldn't do that unless there was some money or access to money. Money, architecture is strictly a money game.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.