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VY: So now, let's move forward to where we left off before, and now we're in Milwaukee, it's 1954, and you're graduating from high school. And so before we move forward from there, would you mind just sort of placing us in the time period and remind us where you were living, what kind of work your parents were doing, how many people were in your immediate family, and if there's anything you remember about graduating from high school that you think would be interesting to share?

DS: Well, 1954, you're right, I graduated from Washington High School, which is now an inner-city high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As I may have mentioned, I was the only Asian American to graduate in a predominately Jewish high school. It was very academically-oriented, and many of the graduates were going on to college. At the time, my father had finally bought his first home in the north side of Milwaukee, and we were actually living in a house owned by my father rather than in public housing prior to the war in company housing. And so this was a major step upward in our climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. My father, at the time, was operating his own radio repair business, which subsequently developed into a radio and television repair business. And my father had, over the years, as a Boy Scout, been very interested in this new technology called radio, and so took a correspondence course and learned how to repair radios. And this was a side activity even in Eatonville where the citizens of Eatonville would come to our community and bring their radios to be repaired. My father worked initially after the war for a large appliance store where he was repairing their radios, and he then branched out in the early 1950s to work on his own as a sole proprietor of a radio repair business. So by that time, I was ready to head off to college, and my brothers, who are several years behind me, were attending also high school. And they had a very productive career in high school where I think my brothers were, one brother was a valedictorian of his class. I think both brothers were presidents of their senior class, and so they were much more gregarious and were much more confident in themselves whereas, in my case, in 1954, I was very reluctant to go off to college. I was given the opportunity or thought about attending the University of Wisconsin and studying chemical engineering, but I was very reluctant to make a move to such a large institution. So I decided to attend a small unaccredited bible college in Dayton, Tennessee, Bryan College, which is still in existence, and it was founded in memory of William Jennings Bryan, that conducted the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. So it was a southern, unaccredited bible school that I attended from my first year, and that was the only school that I felt comfortable attending. After one year at Bryan, I then applied to Wheaton College, a more accredited and well-recognized Christian college. And there I went to school for three years, graduated in 1958.

VY: Why do you think you were hesitant to go to a larger college?

DS: That's really an interesting question, and I've thought about that. Because if you look at the arc of my career, it's gone far beyond a small unaccredited bible college. But my theory is that the internment and the disruption caused a great deal of anxiety for change, and just anxiety that was born out of the internment that just couldn't keep me, couldn't really give me courage to move beyond what was familiar. So I couldn't handle uncertainty, whereas my younger brothers, as I mentioned, who, I don't think, remember much of the circumstances of the internment, are less affected by the upheaval and the uncertainty that the internment caused. But my theory, after all these years, was that I just didn't have the self-confidence to push out into an uncertain world.

VY: That's really interesting. It sounds like you were just at that age during the incarceration experience, or just at that age to be influenced enough to have it kind of affect your perspective on the world, and like you said, cause some anxiety, whereas your brothers who were younger were almost protected from that.

DS: Yes, yeah. It's almost as if there was some part of my psyche that had an arrested development. That it prevented the normal development of age five to, basically ten, twelve years of age, and it stems, I think, from the internment experience and uncertainty that we had to live under.

VY: Do you think that's still a little bit a part of you? I mean, I know -- and we'll get to this more later -- but obviously as you became an adult and your career took off and you got involved in some really important movements later on, you either overcame this, or it stayed with you. Either you changed, and you no longer had this anxiety, or somehow you were able to overcome it.

DS: I think it's a combination of both. I think I may have mentioned to you offline that I still have reoccurring dreams of getting lost and not finding my way back to home or family or familiarity. And this is a reoccurring dream that I have in my eighties. So I think the... I don't know what's causing this, but I think the fear of the unknown was so deeply ingrained, embedded in me at this young age, but that's only a theory. But I firmly believe that there were unspoken damages to one's psyche, especially for children that most likely stayed with, in many cases, with the children throughout their life.

VY: Yeah, you're not the first person to say that, who's had that experience of the reoccurring dreams and that anxiety. I think you're right about that.

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