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BF: This is a Densho interview. The narrator is Mr. Grant Ujifusa. The interviewers are Cherry Kinoshita and Becky Fukuda, and it is September 13, 1997 and we are at the UCLA Campus for the Redress Conference. Grant, I'm going to ask you just a couple of background questions for the viewer to get an idea of, of who you are. What do you do for a living?

GU: I'm a magazine editor and I do original stories for Reader's Digest magazine. I've been there for about nine years and before that I was in book publishing. I was an editor of general interest books at Random House in New York City, and Macmillan in New York City, and earlier with Houghton Mifflin in Boston.

BF: And you're also the author of the Almanac of American Politics, as I understand.

GU: Actually, I'm the co-author of the Almanac of American Politics with a college friend, Michael Barone, and we've been publishing that reference book on Congress every two years since 1972.

BF: Wow. And so you're still doing that, it's...

GU: We're still doing, we still do it. We had one idea and the nice thing about that book is that you never have to think of another idea, it's the same idea over and over again.

BF: But it always needs to be new.

GU: That's right, every time there's an election, Congressional election, there are new members and so, the more turnover -- that's why I'm for term limits -- the more turnover, the better off we sell.

BF: All right. [Laughs] And do you have a family?

GU: I do. I've been married for nineteen years to a woman whose name is Amy Brooks. We have two children, the younger is a boy, sixteen, in high school and the older is eighteen, and I'm very happy to say that he's just started his freshman year at Harvard.

BF: Oh, congratulations. And where does the family reside? Where do you live?

GU: We live in a suburb about twenty miles north of New York City called Chappaqua. It's a typical bedroom community north of New York City.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.