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TI: Well, as you are going through high school and thinking about college and stuff, was there any pressure on you or anyone else, of the Sanseis to run the farm?

LI: No. My dad always, he wanted, education is really important. So my mom and my dad, they wanted us to go to school. So at one time, my dad had four kids going to WSU at the same time, and pretty tough. And so I got a job as an apartment manager, and so we had a free apartment for me and my two brothers. And so I think that helped a lot.

TI: Oh, so, apartment manager here?

LI: At WSU.

TI: At WSU, yeah. And we should... my Yonsei kids would say this: "But, Dad, tuition back then was, at UW, 188 dollars a quarter." So it was kind of the time where we could work part-time and actually... it was probably like you, I mean, I paid for my way through school with part-time work. It was a very different time.

LI: Yeah. But, you know, my parents helped us out. I learned how to drink beer at WSU.

TI: Well, I guess that's... you went to WSU. Because I was in Seattle at UW, so I stayed at home, so I didn't have to...

LI: Yeah. And so growing up on the farm, all we did was work. When we came back from school, we just changed our clothes and went to work. And so I guess I look at the best years of my life were those first two years at WSU, probably not a very good educational year for me academically. But I learned a lot about life during those first two years, and I went from a biology major to become an ag engineering major.

TI: So you chose agricultural engineering thinking you would maybe go into farming?

LI: No. I knew how much work farming was, and so I thought I want to figure out how to make farming easier. And so I was thinking, oh, my ideal dream job was to work for FMC because I remember the food machinery company, their name was on a lot of equipment that I saw in these packing houses and on equipment that, you know, corn harvesters or packing line equipment, things like that. So I kind of thought, oh, I think I want to design that and build that. So that's why I did it. The reason I switched from biology was because I had an uncle who had his master's degree, and he said, "How long do you want to go to school?" I go, "Well, I want to graduate." He goes, "Well, you've got to do that if you're a biology major," he goes, "I got my master's degree and I'm just a technician." He goes, "Your uncle has his PhD and he's working on cancer research," or something like that, and he goes, "but he had to go another x-many years. You want to go to school that long?" and I go, "No." [Laughs] So I started flipping through the catalog and I came up with ag engineering. And I really enjoyed the program.

TI: And so after you graduated from Washington State University in 1979, agricultural engineering, what did you do after that?

LI: I was recruited by these guys at the Hanford nuclear reservation, Battelle, Pacific Northwest Labs, and the section I got recruited in was the food and agriculture section. So they were an odd duck on the Hanford nuclear reservation.

TI: Yeah, I was actually going to say, I mean, on the Hanford nuclear site, so nuclear research, you have the nuclear waste there, you have all sorts of... but around nuclear power.

LI: Right. But it was during the Jimmy Carter years, and so I did some rotations and I got exposed to active and passive solar. I got exposed to some of these alternative energy kind of things in the food and agriculture section, I actually did some paper research on the harvest, collection, and storage of agriculture and agricultural and forest residues. Because they were looking at, that was the energy shortage, energy crisis, we're going to run out of oil. And so they were looking at agriculture and forest wastes to be an energy source as well as solar and anaerobic digestion, direct combustion. And so, yeah, I was doing that, I was doing paper studies, kind of like eighth grade book reports, I would read all these reports and kind of digest them and make one combination like an eighth grade book report. And that was, Shirley Geydesson from the Hanford Technical Library told me that, at one time, my report was the most popular report out of the technical library. Because it was like an eighth grade book report, and it was something that politicians can read and digest and actually get a good idea of what was available for doing things like that. And so those were the Jimmy Carter years. So there was money and there was a lot of emphasis on alternative energy. So it was fun.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.