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PW: So you had two years that you were...

RO: In the army.

PW: In the army. And then I'm just kind of curious, what were your parents doing at that time? This was 1953?

RO: It was 1956... 1955 to '57. No.

PW: No, because had graduated...

RO: Because I graduated, yeah. Anyway...

PW: But your parents around, are they still...

RO: They still ran the restaurant, my younger brother was helping with the restaurant. My elder brother had nothing. He graduated and went to San Francisco, and he was working for a design firm up there. He and his company designed the interior of what was the... it's on the tip of my tongue, Jack Tar. Was that Jack Tar Hotel? It was a big one of Van Ness, big hotel.

PW: But your brother, you and your brother were both heading into this...

RO: Yes. Well, I didn't realize that he would want to do that, because we never... you know, as young boys, we never talk about what we want, do we share information, he ran with his group, I ran with my group, and it was just one of the things that...

PW: But as a professional, what was his style, or what kind of work was he doing?

RO: He was in interior design.

PW: Interesting.

RO: So anyway, as a result, my army years were pretty much normal, in fact because it was a very small base. And so what do you do after hours, what do you do on weekends? It's not as though you can just go ahead and walk into town or whatever, you had to drive out to be able to go ahead and engage in some kind of normal activity. So the people that had cars and so on, we would kind of drive out to Aiken, South Carolina, and go to a polo match, and something that was very, very different, so I'm trying to down to Daytona Beach in Florida in the summer months and so on. So those were very, very limiting, and until then the end of my tour and so on, and at that time, because after I got, after the first year, then I was given a, you can take a furlough for so many weeks that you can come back to home at that time then, and bought a little sports car, then we tooled back to the base. And that was then my choice of transportation, but there was not any dating or anything at all. There was people that you just kind of knew. But then again, as a result, on that amount of time, you find how you functioned within that, within that small headquarters group, and so then I got to know the person who was charged in the mess hall, he also the base swimming pool. And so somehow I asked him about that and I said, "Well, you need lifeguards," because I enjoyed swimming. So we had to take a lifeguard class, I guess it started under whatever system. He had to learn how to go ahead and do lifesaving techniques and so on, and I was hired as a lifeguard there. And so on weekends or days that I wasn't working, there was a base pool there, and you were just there. And you get to know people, and get to know the manager, the person who ran the commissary, they're very simple.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.