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BT: Well, so you graduated college, you're going to school at night working, you're married, where did you live after you got married? Where did you end up?

FS: Okay. We got married in La Canada. And we had our marriage reception, it was quite a large one right under the camphor tree on Westridge School, when it was all lawn. Now they got it all paved, and the tree is still there, but it was a great big lawn area which my dad took a picture of that and (Archie M.) Toyo, of course, took many pictures. And so the reception, probably the one and only reception of the garden lawn of Westridge. So that was our beginning. And then what's also interesting is that it was this guy, the catering, I forgot his name now. He first became a pretty big catering service for Japanese in L.A., very well-known, I forgot the name.

BT: Chet Yamauchi?

FS: Yeah, yeah, Chester Yamauchi, right. That was his first job, right there on the Westridge lawn. And so then we got married, we did a little short stint. By that time I had a little MGA convertible, and so our brief honeymoon trip was up the coast, (S.F.) back to Vegas and back, kind of thing, which is kind of stupid, if you think about it. MGA didn't have much of a radiator (across the desert), it would cost them a lot, but we made it. It was war. And we came back to... oh, I know. Right before we took the trip, I had put an ad in the Star News. "A Japanese (student)," something like that, "Japanese boy looking for a place to live in exchange for housework," or that kind of stuff. Okay, so from Westridge, I think it was right before we got married. And this lady called me up, and she was Mrs. Warner with the Borg-Warner Estate in Chicago, big time company. And she had a mansion right down here adjacent to Mayfield school. It was five acres and a great big condo is there now, but it was one of the more beautiful mansions. And it was very Spanish, all that stuff, and tile roof made of concrete. So she was living there alone, and the only person else that lived there was the chauffeur who lived away, came in every day, if she needed to drive. And then there was an accountant that managed all her money. So these were just two people just hanging on, I guess, until she was gone. And so she called me and she said she had a garage apartment in the back of her property. It was like a, there were two apartments on two separate, two or three car garage units below, and a stairway up the middle and you go left or right at the top. Well, the one, both of them were unoccupied, really dirty. Marian and I took the one to the south, to the left, and that was kind of where we started.

It turns out Mrs. Warner was probably more lonely. I don't think I've ever seen such an exquisite interior. So I spent many hours with her just sitting and talking in her library, which had like a twelve-foot ceiling full of books, luckily. [Inaudible] would be just drooling over it. And then she had several other sitting room and then a large room that had all these mounted African, I don't know if they were lions or bears or whatever they had on the wall. And the woodwork all over was probably African mahogany, it was dark wood, beautiful wood, and sort of a curved stairway that went up to the second floor. Quite elegant I think. Claire Oogard would be drooling if she knew that place. But they tore it down and put in this big condo. Anyway, it was 891 South Orange Grove. The reason I remember that is the Heritage had a story about 891 South Orange Grove, it wasn't that house. Marian looked at it and said, "That's not 89 South Orange Grove," so anyway.

So we went from there, then we took our trip. We went with our good friends the Bentons, they were in our wedding. Tom Benton was kind of (different), more far out than me. As an artist, he decided he's going to build his own place in Aspen, Colorado. So he had already started looking for the property, (he came) from the Glendale area and his mother had some, a property in the mountains there, in the hillside. And their family must have had a little bit of, well, not big level. And I had to bring him up because he was really a very integral part of my life early on. And he went... well, he bought a minibus in Europe, and in those days, you can buy. And so he got seven of us adults to agree to ride with him and share the gas expense in Europe. So Tom and Betty and Marian and I, by then I sold my MG for a more practical car, the German people's car, Volkswagen VW, a little beetle. And we drove all the way across country, four of us, with luggage for four people to travel Europe without a clear-cut number of days. So we went across country, up Route 66, and saw the architecture, and we looked at some of the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. And then when we caught a ship, then we found someone that was willing to keep our car in New York. And we took a ship across because that was the least expensive way of travel, and ended up in England. I don't know if it's New Haven, I forgot the port. And then he picked up his car and the other three people met us over there. So then from there, we had a rough itinerary of maybe the cities and countries that we went to see, but we didn't have a (plan). We kind of discovered our way all over Europe in this minivan with seven, I don't know, forty-five horsepower. So seven adults and seven suitcases. So we traveled Europe for about eight thousand miles, five dollars a day per person, that's when that book came out. So that's kind of how I got my experience. And some appreciation for the old gothic churches and things like that. And because of that, I was able to pass the state board (exam), had all the Sir Bannister Fletcher stuff. Yeah, because I have to see... I can't read it --

BT: Instead of reading a book?

FS: I got to see it, yeah. So that's kind of how we started, that's how I studied and learned about, you know, all components of architecture. I come from that side of it, seeing it. It was quite a memorable trip. Can you imagine going down the Swiss Alps and a forty-five horsepower, seven. [Laughs] Yeah, it's before that movie of the yellow... I don't know what they call it, it went all over the place.

BT: That was fun.

FS: But yeah, quite an adventure.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.