<Begin Segment 32>

AI: Excuse me a minute. Before, before you went, you were in your senior year.

RT: Right.

AI: And tell me about what happened. Your grades were excellent, you were at the top of your class, and what happened at graduation time?

RT: Well, it was before graduation, and I guess they always pick out the valedictorian, salutatorian, and the superintendent... now, the superintendent, it's a small system so the superintendent is the authority, the highest authority of the school system. And he called me in, and he told me that, "You should be valedictorian, but you're not going to be," because they decided, they -- and I think this is the school board now. My father thinks that there were a lot of teachers involved, I don't know. But I believe it's the school board that made the decision. And they decided that I could not be valedictorian because I had not been there four full years. I had been there from my sophomore year and they decided that the valedictorian had to be somebody that had been there four full years. And that was it. That was the rationale that they gave, and that was the way it was. Yeah.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.