<Begin Segment 11>

FS: But I sponsored four or five Japanese -- not Japanese American -- Japanese girls at the University. When I was a senior in the College of Forestry, there was a required subject in physics. And when I went to the first class under a professor by the name of Osborn, who was really an SOB, very rough, a little Japanese girl, student, came in about five minutes late. She, it was the first class and she had had trouble finding the room so forth, and that fella, Osborn, bawled her out, laid her out so... rough, I got up and walked out and never went back.

So I couldn't graduate from the University of Washington. Instead I went to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University as the protege of a vice president of the Nash Motor Company, now the Chrysler, who I had met when I was a guide on Mt. Rainier -- C.B. Vores. C.B. Vores and his son, who became a US Congressman from California, walked up front with me on the glacier and we talked. And he discovered that I wasn't gonna' be able to graduate from the University of Washington, and so I, he learned I guess that I wanted to go to, instead to the New York City College of Forestry at Syracuse. He said, "Well, the Lord has given me more money than I deserve, and I am enjoying spending some of it helping other people." He said, "You bring Ruth," -- we were living near Paradise Inn at the time -- "You bring Ruth down to have dinner with I and my wife and two children tonight. We want to talk to you." And so he said, "I want to give you that year at Syracuse. You think it over, and come back before we leave in the morning and let me know." And Ruth and I talked it over and Ruth didn't like the idea of a direct handout. She said, "Well, let's accept it as a loan, on paper, IOU," and he said okay. And we used something over $2,000 of Vores' money to graduate from the New York State College of Forestry. I had it written on paper as a loan. And when in 1922 I graduated, I got a job on the park and I wrote Vores saying that we had some income now, and we'd like to start paying back that loan. He sent me the paper "canceled" and then a note saying, "Put it in the bank for your son."

Well, our son was getting 90 cents an hour on the campus while most of the students assistants were getting 35 cents an hour. He was getting 90 cents an hour helping Burt Farquharson, structural engineer, redesign the Tacoma Narrows bridge that had blown down. Ken built a replica of the bridge in the same ratio of stress to design, so forth, and put it in the wind tunnel and blew it down, blew it apart, and found out what was wrong with Galloping Gertie, the bridge. And the new bridge that Ken helped design has stood up ever since. The trouble with the bridge was that it was designed by Roebling -- who had built the Golden Gate Bridge and several other suspension bridges -- but they decided that the main member might better be a solid 8-foot steel wall, and that acted in only a 40-mile-an-hour wind, like a ribbon in the wind, you know how it goes. And that tore the bridge apart. So the new bridge has a open truss, wind blows through.

Well, Ken didn't need the money and so I have spent it helping other students, including three or four Japanese girls. One of them I'm very fond of, Satoshi Nagasawa, has two little children, a little girl and a little boy. The girl is named Yuki and the boy is named Floyd.

EG: Really? [Laughs]

FS: Foid in Japanese. He's probably the only Foid in all of Japan. I got a telephone call one day, and a little girl voice said, "Ojiisan, this is Yuki. How are you?" Ojiisan is "grandfather." And at three years old she had called me from Tokyo, and she speaks pretty good English now, and she's teaching Foid, little brother, English. I'll show you their pictures. And I hope, I think they will come.

Well, what brought this on? I've helped quite a number of Japanese students at the University, sponsored them. My son just returned a couple days from safari in South Africa. I guess I told you. And... I lost the trend. I don't remember just what I wanted to say.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.