<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So let's go back to you, and so what year did you graduate from Granite High School?

JK: In '32.

TI: So 1932 you graduated from high school. And then what did you do after you graduated from high school?

JK: I went right to dental school.

TI: And this was at the university in Salt Lake City?

JK: No, no, it was at the University of California in Berkeley.

TI: So you'd go from high school to dental school back then? Not undergraduate, but you'd go straight to dental school?

JK: Yeah, well, the undergraduate, the undergraduate school I went to University of Utah for, I was required to two years undergraduate for dental school.

TI: Okay, so you graduated from Granite High School, went two years at University of Utah and taking just general core classes, kind of? And then went to Berkeley for dental school.

JK: Uh-huh.

TI: And why did you choose Berkeley?

JK: Well, at that time, Berkeley and Southern Cal was the only two dental schools on the West Coast. And the nearest one was Northwestern in Chicago, and I had an entry into all three schools. And so I went down, I thought I didn't want to go back to Chicago, so I went down to Los Angeles and I, I had one of the students there show me around the school. Well, the University of Southern California at that time belonged to a Dr. Ford. It didn't, it wasn't a University of Southern California, at that time it wasn't until the University of Southern California took over the Ford Dental School there, and then they converted it to the USC dental school. Well, I went through the school, and it was an old building, and the tuition was twice what it was at Cal. So I went up to Berkeley, I mean, up to San Francisco and checked out the school there, and I found that the tuition there was about half of what it was at USC. And I didn't have any money, so I decided, well, that's where I'd enroll. And so I enrolled right at the University of California, at the dental school there and graduated in '37.

TI: And why did you choose dental school? What was it about dentistry that you're interested in?

JK: I think the reason for that is my mother wanted all three of us to go to college, and it was quite a nice financial feat to be able to go to college at that time. Because I know my neighbors, they had three children, three children, and they could only send one to college. And in fact there was a girl that was living in Salt Lake that wanted to go to college. And neither her parents or her friends could raise the twenty-five dollars necessary for the tuition for her to go to college, and so she couldn't go to college, and that was the tuition fee, twenty-five dollars then. And yet how my folks raised the money for a, for us to, for all three of us to go to college at the same time... my mother wanted my, Joe, to be a physician. And she says to me, she wanted me to go into dentistry, and she wanted Tom, my younger brother, to go to college and learn the, learn business. And so he went to the business school and I went to dental school, and my older brother went to medical school.

TI: Wow, so your mother had a huge influence on the three of you.

JK: Oh, yes. Well, my mother was very adamant about us going to college. When we were in Ogden and Joe was ready to graduate from high school, she says, "We've gotta move to Salt Lake because that's the only place where we have a university." Ogden had a two-year college program at Weber State, but that wasn't adequate for her. And so my father just gave up his business there and moved to Salt Lake.

TI: Well, I think your mother was very forward-thinking to, to have that.

JK: Oh, she was, she was the... I'd say the impetus for us to go to college.

TI: So let's go back to Berkeley. You said you graduated in 1937, but before we leave Berkeley, are there any memories or, of Berkeley that you have?

JK: In Berkeley?

TI: Yeah, Berkeley, anything that...

JK: Well, dental school was a school that you go from 8 to 5 every day, even 8 to 12 on Saturdays. And I really didn't have time for any extracurriculars. I learned how to play golf there, and the only way I learned to play golf was I was playing a little tennis before that, and of course, San Francisco is a town where it's moist all the time. And the tennis racquet, the guts on the tennis racquets would get fuzzy all the time and I'd have to have it repaired, and it used to cost me four dollars each time I'd have to have it repaired. And I couldn't afford that, so I had to give up tennis. And another dentist there, Dr. Murata was his name, and Mrs. Murata says to her husband, "Now, you're getting pretty fat, you're putting on a lot of weight." And she says, "You better get out and play some golf." And so she went out and bought him a whole set of golf clubs. And says, "Now, you take these clubs when you go out with Dr. Hirota and Dr. Oyama and go out and play some golf." Well, he didn't, he wasn't about to go play golf, so he called me in one day, and he says, "Take these golf clubs," he says, "take 'em and you go play with them." And that's how I learned how to play golf. I just took his golf clubs and went out with Dr. Hirota, and they were just beginning to play golf, and so I took his, these set of golf clubs. Of course, I couldn't afford anything like that, but...

TI: That's a good story. So when you go to Berkeley, the Japanese community is much larger than what you were used to.

JK: Yeah.

TI: So did you participate at all with the Japanese community, do anything there?

JK: No, uh-uh.

TI: But you met, obviously, some Japanese, the dentists.

JK: Only, the only participation as far as sports is to go out and play golf with the, one fellow was, that I roomed with that had graduated, and he had started a practice right in San Francisco.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.