<Begin Segment 28>
SY: So did you live with your parents this whole time while you were in college?
BW: So I lived with my parents throughout the time I was at Northridge, and so in '65 I was a junior, so I moved with them to the other house. It was a big three-bedroom house, so it was just the two of them and me and my brother. Then my brother passed away in 1968, but he had already moved out. He decided to go to UCLA, so he was living at UCLA and then he was going back East, so he was already gone. So just the three of us in the house.
SY: And how did your brother pass away? He was fairly young.
BW: He was fairly young. He decided he wanted to be a minister, Christian minister, so he finished UCLA and then was going to Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. So he was over there and then while he was there -- and then while he was there I was in Japan, actually, for a year.
SY: That was after you graduated from Cal State Northridge?
BW: Yeah. So I took a job up in Sunnyvale, doing, I was a mechanical engineer. That's what I graduated in. Took a job, then from Sunnyvale, after working there a couple years, I decided to spend a year in Japan to try to learn the language that I didn't learn while I was going to Japanese school. But during the meantime he went to seminary, and then he met this young lady in seminary and she lived in upstate New York, and so during Easter break he and his friend, they went boating, and there was a boating accident and both of them drowned in the lake. So that was '68, so he was twenty-three at the time, not quite twenty-three.
SY: So do you remember the impact that that had on your family when your...
BW: Yeah. Everyone was, well, at that age where I could really see and understand better, reading people's feelings from what, their face and body language, so everyone was quite impacted. And even my uncle Tomio, who, like I said, the guy is a tough guy, but even he was crying when he came to pick me up at the airport. It's kind of funny, when I heard my brother died I was in Japan, and so I didn't cry. I mean, I, at first they couldn't find the body, so there's this feeling like, "Well maybe he's still alive. Maybe he got out and he's wandering around somewhere." You're thinking all these irrational thoughts 'cause they couldn't find the body, neither body. They're both gone. Found out later the body sinks until it starts to get bloated and, but because the water was so cold -- this was in April and the water was still ice cold -- the body stayed at the bottom for a long time, months. But anyway, so you're thinking, "Maybe he's still alive. We don't know he's dead." So I was kind of blase in one sense, although my father, he was in Japan at the time so we flew back together, and he was very quiet. And then when I saw my uncle crying I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is serious." I mean, this, I never saw him cry.
SY: And your mother, your mother's reaction? Was there something...
BW: Yeah, she was sad. And so my, my father and I flew to New York, upstate New York to the lake, to help look for the body, so we spent a week there, what they call dredging the lake.
SY: Difficult time.
BW: Yeah, but it gives you something to do.
<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.