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TI: So after about eight months in Berlin, you're now ordered back?

YM: Came back, yeah. And I went to the same place where I was inducted, I believe. Yeah, I remember I went there, and then I went to Detroit. By that time, Alice had finished her internship and she was in Detroit because she knew I was gonna go there. She was living with my folks there, and she had a job as a dietician at Grace Hospital. So I joined her there, and then we found an apartment and we set up housekeeping.

TI: So when you returned, first tell me about your parents. How, it had been several years now. How had they changed?

YM: Well, they had been living with my sister and her husband when they first came out of camp. And when I returned, they had found some kind of a public housing and they were living there with Alice and my brother, my younger brother. And it was sort of tight quarters, but they were doing okay. My dad had found a job as some factory custodian or something, custodial job. And my mother was doing, she was a very good seamstress, so I think she was working at some ladies dress shop doing fittings and things like that. So they seemed to be doing okay. And my brother was going to school, I think he was either... yeah, I think he was in high school by that time.

TI: And so you returned, so your parents are there, your brother, your older sister and her husband are there.

YM: Yeah, there.

TI: And Alice. And so what do you do?

YM: Well, I thought I'd take advantage of GI Bill and go get my master's degree, but then I had a change of heart. I said, I have my job waiting for me here -- they had to keep your job for you. "I think I need some money," so I went back to work. I never did get back to college to get my master's.

TI: So you started back with the City of Detroit working that job?

YM: Yeah. And then my first son came along, and then we bought a home right in Royal Oak, Michigan, and our second and third sons came along. Alice quit working as soon as the first one was born. And so we lived there for seventeen years. I returned in 1946, and we left Detroit in 1961. In the meantime, I had gotten another job, I left the City of Detroit and went to work for another consulting firm, engineering consulting firm.

TI: And were you sort of specializing in a certain type of consulting or engineering?

YM: Well, it was more or less architectural engineering, which involves heating, ventilating and air conditioning and so forth.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.