<Begin Segment 10>

DG: The second point that was in one of the minutes is that the professional people needed help in getting into organizations.

NS: Yes. My husband was a member of King County Medical Society. He applied for the Spokane Medical Society, but they wouldn't accept his transfer. And so he could practice in the state of Washington because his license was for practicing. But he was stymied when it came to hospital privileges because the hospitals had their own standards of acceptance; and you had to be a citizen, I suppose, and a resident of Spokane. Well, since he didn't have his citizenship, why, he was refused staff membership at the Spokane hospital. So in order to take care of people who needed hospitalization, he used some of the Spokane friends and doctors who became his friends in Spokane.

DG: So it was important that you -- just like nowadays, it's who you knew in a way. It's important who you know in a lot of ways.

NS: Well, not only that, whoever made the rules that only citizens could be members of a staff, I suppose it would mean a whole staff of doctors. It could be who you know and who was champion of your cause as to whether you were going to be accepted or not.

DG: What about the nurses?

NS: The nurses were the same way, I guess. They were all fired, of course, at the time of evacuation. And my good friend Masako went to Denver, and she became -- and she got work there and she was there until she retired. But I know that when the coast opened, she came back. But she didn't find a very friendly atmosphere here so she chose to go back to Denver.

DG: And not very many people could become teachers so that was not a problem yet, I suppose.

NS: What? Teachers?

DG: Right.

NS: No. There weren't too many teachers.

DG: And I don't know what other professional people there were, not too many yet.

NS: Not too many as yet. There were some nurses, but some of them went to Chicago, which was open, and also -- well, I know of one or two that went to Chicago and maybe to the East Coast. But outside of that, they waited until the coast was opened and came back.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.