<Begin Segment 8>

EO: When did you begin writing?

JO: Well, that's an odd thing. [Laughs] I wasn't interested, interested in writing. But one day we were called to a general assembly at the school. This was in Pocatello, Idaho. And towards the end of his state of the school report, the principal announced that we were going to have a student newspaper. And the next thing I knew, he named me as editor of that paper. Now I had no writing experience. So what happened was that I don't have this talent for writing fairy tales, you know, or anything like that, fictional stuff. So, so I just scratched my head to see what I could do about putting out a paper. We had no advisor even, so you were all on your own. And the inspiration came to me, that I had read a little blue book, you know, about the lost continent of Atlantis. So I thought if it interested me so much, it must surely interest the other students, so I published a portion of it. Ten days later, I was called to the office. And the principal -- he was by himself then -- and he says to me after hemming and hawing around, standing by the front window. He finally asked me, "Did you write that story?" And I said, "No." And he says, "Who wrote it?" And then he asked me, he says, "Where did you get it?" So I told him, "I have this little blue book and I took it out of that." And he says, "That's plagiarism." He says, "You can't publish something somebody else wrote." Now I didn't know what plagiarism was, but when he said you can't publish that somebody else wrote, well, I understood that, see. And then he said to me after thinking it over, he says, "I want you to write the next story." No, I can't write those stories, really. I never had no experience. So, so when the next edition came, why, I decided well, I had read a lot about Zane Gray and Western stories in my youth, and I says, "Why don't I write about a wild horse and put that wild horse into Montana? This certainly can't be plagiarism because we don't have that kind of story." So, so I wrote that and published it. That's how I got my start. [Laughs]

CO: Did you enjoy that?

JO: No, not that particular thing. But, see, the following year I transferred back one term to Bainbridge Island. And in the spring of that year, I was named journalism delegate to the State of Washington Student Leaders conference. And I think you could say that that set me off, sort of.

CO: So did you graduate?

JO: Oh yes, I graduated. I graduated and I was recommended to the University of Washington and the assistant dean, a man Sid Spears came to recruit me to the university, but this was the depths of the Great Depression and the wages I could learn, earn in the summertime in the canneries had dropped so drastically that I didn't have the necessary finances to go to university.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.