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VY: Okay. So let's see. So you have now gone to Wheaton College. So tell us a little bit about your experience while you were at Wheaton College?

DS: As I mentioned to you, my roommate was Jim McDermott, who was the long term, longstanding congressman from your district, I think, in Seattle. He was an undergraduate, he was a pre-med who went on to medical school, and he subsequently ran for mayor of Seattle and lost, but ran for Congress and only recently, within the past several years, retired from his seat in the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress. But it was at Wheaton where I described the internment experience to Jim, and it was Jim that keeps reminding me of his support for redress, for the efforts of Japanese Americans in general. And I think his district was, had a very large Japanese American constituency. But it was my early conversations with Jim that alerted him to the internment experience.

VY: So that's interesting that you began talking about it, that kind of early stage in your life. And I wonder how you felt about that. It sounds like you were able to talk about it with someone who you considered a friend, and so did that feel like a safer way to...

DS: I think so, but once again, I was one of the very few minorities in an all-white Christian, evangelical Christian school. So there have been long periods in my life where we are, I'm an only minority in a large group. And it's part of maturation, I think, how to manage that, how to accept your role in society. And it was part of exploration of other opportunities. And so when I graduated from Wheaton College, I was still uncertain as to whether I should go or what I should do. Many of my colleagues that majored in chemistry as I did, went off to graduate school and finished very quickly, their degrees, and went on to develop very illustrious careers. Whereas in my case, I had a string of failures in graduate school where I went to three different graduate schools until I finally was able to complete my doctorate. But I think, again, this lack of confidence, this sense of uncertainty or managing uncertainty, and lack of... well, not lack of direction, but lack of confidence led to a string of successive failures. And again, if I were to develop a theory of why I lacked so much confidence, I think the major event in my life was, again, the internment experience.

VY: It's interesting to me to hear you describe yourself as someone with a lack of confidence and having a string of failures, because I think anybody that knows you today probably would be surprised by that. I'm surprised by that. And I wonder if what you're calling a string of failures maybe were more, kind of, milestones that you got through to kind of get you to your next step in life?

DS: Well, I wouldn't call it milestones, I would call it just growing up, maturation, becoming a full-fledged adult. And I think I best describe myself as having an arrested development. And finally, after, what, eighty, over eighty years, I feel much more like a fully developed person.

VY: It's kind of an ongoing process, isn't it? [Laughs]

DS: Well, I think everybody goes through that. But it's taken me a long time to develop into a person.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.