<Begin Segment 20>

MN: And then once you got discharged you returned to Southern California where your father was living in Boyle Heights. Is that, is that right?

SO: Yeah. He was living with a family.

MN: And then once you returned, what did you do?

SO: I applied to, for the University of Southern Cal. I was gonna go into architect, architecture. And waiting to be accepted to go to school, I think we had heard that the farming up in the Sacramento Valley was really a profitable situation, so a group of us got together and -- I think there were three of us, four of us -- we got together and we went up to Sacramento to work on farms. Our first job was cutting asparagus, so we went, we went to the farm and we got up at four o'clock, they woke us up at four o'clock in the morning and we had breakfast and they took us out. It was still dark, so the guy says, "This is how you cut asparagus." They were cutting what they call half, half green, where the upper part of the asparagus is green and the rest of it white. So he says, "Here's how you cut the asparagus." And we looked down at the ground and says, "What asparagus?" We couldn't see because it was dark. Well, we worked one day and I think we made a dollar an hour. We made eight dollars apiece. This wasn't for us, so we quit and we found a job just moving sprinkler pipes. They, they'd pump the water into long tubes that went the width of the field and they had sprinklers on 'em, so we'd sprinkle for ten minutes, then we'd break it down, move the pipes over, set it up, then sprinkle some more. So we did that for about, probably a week, and then we came home. [Laughs] Farming was not for us.

MN: And then meanwhile you're waiting to get into USC on the GI Bill, right?

SO: Yeah.

MN: What did you end up becoming?

SO: I ended up becoming an engineer, civil engineer. I transferred from SC to UCLA.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.