<Begin Segment 16>

SY: So when you graduated, or when you finished Art Center, I guess you get a degree in fine arts?

RN: It's a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

SY: Bachelor of Fine Arts. So what do you do with that?

RN: Well, I freelanced as a magazine photographer, I did actually fairly well. I got stuff in Life magazine, McCall's, a lot of small magazines, yeah. So I did okay, but grew kind of dissatisfied because all of the picture stories I wanted to do like stuff on my dad or wouldn't sell, I mean the magazines weren't interested. And so the things that sold I really didn't like, profiles on this guy who made Eiffel Towers out of toothpicks, so it wasn't very satisfying as the photography part. But so I decided, a friend of mine was a photographer, we partnered up and opened up an advertising studio, and we did a lot of commercial advertising photo studio, so we did quite well. He did mostly business part of it and I did mostly the photography part.

SY: And who did, did you have someone doing design for you?

RN: Oh, no, we were, we would do the photography for agencies, and we did a lot of food, we did some local car ads, and one of our mainstay clients was Blue Chip Stamps, so we'd do their whole catalog and all of that.

SY: That was quite a successful business.

RN: Yeah, yeah, so I had a, my Porsche. See, I owned a Porsche.

SY: This was how far into your career from graduation?

RN: That would be, we'd be getting into the... and I spent, I'm sorry, between the magazine work and the opening of the studio, I spent two years in the U.S. Army. I forgot that.

SY: Well, that's pretty important.

RN: That's in there. And so I...

SY: You were drafted.

RN: I was drafted, yeah. I thought I could just, I was twenty-five or so, or I was twenty-four and I think they don't draft you after twenty-five anyway, but they drafted me. But I was fortunate because I was kind of, the Vietnam War wasn't even on the horizon, and it was the tail end of the Korean War. So it was the big Cold War, the Berlin Wall would go up soon. I think it went up just as I got to Germany, I was stationed in Germany. And so I ended up teaching photography, so I traveled from base to base in Europe teaching. It's essentially part of an aerial photography, and so actually I had very good time. [Laughs]

SY: And you still had to go through basic?

RN: Oh, yeah, yeah, all of that.

SY: Once you got out, then...

RN: Yes, it was pretty... I would have never gone to Europe at that time anyway, so I got to travel.

SY: So it was an experience. So then after you got out, then that's when you started this...

RN: The advertising.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.