<Begin Segment 34>

AI: And what was it like for you to come on to, to go to college, to be in this new city, and to go onto campus?

RT: Well, coming from a small town, you go to a big city and then the campus of the university is quite large. And you really had to find your own way. You don't have people holding you by the hand and leading you around, so you really had to, to try and be on your own, yeah. Again, maybe it was because they exposed us to being on our own for so long that it wasn't quite as bad. I just knew that we had to, that I had to do it. Yeah, it was, it's a big school, and of course, we come from a town that doesn't even have 2,000 people, and you come to a campus that has... at that time it wasn't that big, probably maybe 15,000, but the GIs come back and see, I was -- that was 1945. And the GIs starting coming back in '46. And before I finished, I believe the university had grown to about 30 to 40,000. So, huge for somebody that came from a school where the graduating class was thirty-two or something like that. Yeah.

AI: And how did you decide what to go into?

RT: Well, first I wanted to go into pre-med., and I did take a lot of science courses. I like science, and so I was taking a lot of science courses. And as I said, a lot of GIs came back and they were, it was very difficult at that time to find a slot. Well, they wouldn't accept me and probably if I had stayed on and taken another year -- 'cause this was after three years I applied -- possibly I would have gotten into a medical school, but I think that it would have meant another four years for my parents, too, not only me, but my parents. And I thought with the education that I did have, that I could convert it to a teaching degree, so I did. I got a liberal arts degree in three years, which was not worth very much, and then finished up in education.

And let's see, 1948 I got my liberal arts and then in '49 I got my BS in education. And I didn't find out 'til much later, that... I had gone home. And after I had left home to go back to college, 'cause I tried to get home during the summer, and... that I had received an acceptance, a telegram, from a medical school, but in those days they didn't have a phone, no e-mail for sure, and so I never did know. But evidently, University of Chicago had accepted me. But I never knew that, and in a way that's fate, because then it would be a dilemma as to would I be able to go.

So, anyway, I graduated in education. And I went out to teach in a little town in western Minnesota called Herman, and that was my first year of teaching, and I taught one year before I got married. Yeah. And I took a break because we had four kids very close together, and after ten years, then I went back to teaching.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.