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BN: And then you said you didn't go overseas. How did that come about, or how did you avoid...

FS: Yeah, I didn't try to avoid it. What happened is because of the timing and because of... I realized that I didn't want to serve an extra year, and I didn't know anything about this. I'm not a very good form observer, I don't read what I'm given. So when I found out that if you go in the service to be an officer, you had to be active for an extra year. And that's when I realized that it's not my thing, and I declined and they reassigned me. And then so from there, I was assigned to Fort Sheridan in Chicago, and of course, the jock side of me, I was playing basketball and I broke my foot and had a big cast. And then I got transferred from there to Fort Carson, Colorado, where I spent the rest of my career.

BN: Were you disappointed you didn't go overseas or relieved?

FS: I didn't quite understand that.

BN: The fact that you didn't go overseas, was that a relief to you or were you actually disappointed that you didn't get to go?

FS: I don't think... let's see. I was twenty-one years old or twenty years old, I was pretty young. I don't think that kind of thing really occurred to me. When you're growing up, there's a lot of things that you don't think that deeply about. I guess if I were good friends with the guys that went to basic with, it might have been one thing. But because I had a gap by being in leadership school, they went their way and were already going to Korea, and I stayed back a little longer. So I don't think there was, for me, any awareness of that kind of thing. A lot of it is you keep going. That's why I started learning more about... I have different thoughts of those experiences. It was all positive for me.

BN: Okay. And then how long were you in in total, then?

FS: About two years. Not quite two years, because they cut it back a little bit and get early release, but there was nothing... but my time in Fort Carson also was sort of special because I had different experiences. Because of my background, I had a little bit of engineering and things, so they put me in the Corps of Engineers. And I was assigned to a battalion, and they called me a Chief Draftsman, I felt pretty good, that seemed to give me a title. It didn't give me more ranks, I just moved up the natural way. But I had a different kind of relationship again. I came to understand how the military -- and you take a large camp like that, it's now Fort Carson but at that time it was Camp Carson. And the battalions, our commander's wife was the head of the women's club for the whole camp. So she kind of controlled... and the women's club controlled the military. They're the ones that the ladies could tell the commanding general, "Hey, those guys look sloppy," and boy, they clean it up in a hurry. So that's something I learned, early politics of the military because I was kind of... well, I became sort of the favorite of this woman, the wife of the commander of our battalion, the colonel's wife. And it was because she discovered I could draw a little bit, so I made signs and things for our unit, kind of a little bit special. I did a carving for the women's club wall that depicted our battalion, so I became sort of her favorite, if you will. So again, it's, yeah, everything was positive. Because of the few skills I had at that time, playing a lot of ball, first time I got my teeth knocked out by playing baseball. Some guy... I loved sports, so I played baseball for the battalion team, so I got my front teeth knocked out. That wasn't good. But I also played against Billy Martin, who had just won the World Series and got drafted, so we got that kind of stuff on record. It was all good. First time I made any money, because I had a salary. I came out of camp and my parents didn't have much, grew up at Westridge. I guess I was a little bit spoiled, and it was sort of nice to be somebody. I was able to become somebody in the military.

BN: So you were at Camp Carson when you were discharged then?

FS: Yeah. And I bought my first car that I paid for.

BN: What happened to the other car, the fancy one?

FS: Well, the car, see, the first car we had was the one my mother bought for me, it was a black Chevrolet. And it was partly so that they could get around, because neither drove. That car was left with my mother when I went to camp, to the army. So she was driving this black Chevrolet that was lowered, with pipes on it. [Laughs]

BN: I'm just imagining a Nisei woman driving that car.

FS: Yeah, she had to learn clutch cars, and you know how that is when anybody learned how to drive a clutch in those days, it was pretty rough. Yeah, so my first car then was a great big Buick convertible, and all the guys in my battalion, we can drive up to Colorado, I mean, drive up to Greely and different places where the colleges were, where the many Hawaiian girls used to go to college at Colorado State.

BN: So then when you were discharged, did you come back to California?

FS: Yeah, I came back to Westridge School.

BN: I'm sorry, came back to...

FS: Where I grew up, Westridge School, where my father was working. That was home still for me. This time I had a big Buick.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.