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BN: Then was the group mostly people from Hawaii, or did it include the kotonks also? And obviously your husband is, but in general, was the interaction kind of with mainland people, too?

JK: It was a whole mixture. Some of them were our former classmates. Christmastime, "Can we come and sleep over?" and stuff like that. But then the ones that kept coming, like my husband and another person's future husband and another person's, were mostly... one was a kotonk, no, two were kotonks, and one was from Hawaii, but up there, studying.

BN: Did you actually use "kotonk" at that time?

JK: No. [Laughs]

BN: So what was your impression of your future husband when you first met him?

JK: I told him to go away. [Laughs] I said I've been in a girls' school for four years, and I'm here at Columbia. My parents think I'm here to get a degree, but I'm here to play. I want to meet some boys. And so he'd go away for a while and then he'd be back again and say, "Is it time, can I come?" And so finally he wore me down. [Laughs] By the end of the year, we decided to get married.

BN: When did he first... because he's from California, when did he first meet your family in Hawaii and so forth? How did that go?

JK: He was clever. [Laughs] Actually, he didn't meet them before getting married, but a dear friend of my father's was coming, going up, traveling up there. And so my father told him to look him over, and so he did. And my husband-to-be asked me all about this person. And I said, "You know, he really likes dogs, and he's raised dogs and all that." So when they met, my husband's talking to him about dogs. And to the point where he convinced that person that when we came here to get married, that person wanted to take him to all the dog things, little realizing, yeah. But my dad was kind of, hmm, like that. I think what he wanted for me and what I wanted, what I needed, were two different things, and so I think it worked out all right.

BN: So you got married. You came back here to get married, but then you moved?

JK: Moved back, yeah.

BN: You lived back east, or on the continent at least, for a few more years.

JK: Yeah.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.