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MN: This is session 7 on March 22, 2006. This is an interview with Mr. Katsugo Miho at Honolulu, Hawaii, University of Hawaii campus. And interviewer is Michiko Kodama Nishimoto. And today we're going to continue from your days at George Washington law school. But first of all, I wanted to find out, why did you decide on going to George Washington law school and not anywhere else?

KM: Well, the first reason why I went to George Washington was because my older brother Katsuro attended George Washington university law school. And besides that, Harvard and Yale were almost literally impossible to get in, number one. And number two, the expenses were far greater than George Washington. So I went to George Washington, and, to my surprise, found that there were a great many others who were also at George Washington or Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. There were a lot of Hawaii students, and a lot of my veteran friends were there. We were surprised to see each other just as much as choosing GW.

MN: Who were some of these veteran friends that ended up at George Washington or Georgetown?

KM: My George Washington classmates... not classmates, they were there at least before me, was Shigeto Kanemoto, John Desha, Sam Nakashima, and George Holt, who had gone to law when I went to GW. There was a, Winona Ellis, Winona Rubin's brother, older brother, was also there, but he was attending Georgetown. When I was there, we had about twenty to twenty-five of us in law school, there were quite a few. But the year after I got there, John Ushijima and Dan Inouye also. I spent two years with them. In fact, John and I roomed for close to two years. Just the other day, Maggie passed away, and the fondest memory I have of the two years that we spent together, got to a point where John and I were rooming together and Maggie and Dan would join us for supper at least once a week. And depending on whose week it was for cooking, and Maggie had to taste the cooking of either myself or John. We alternated weekly, and we used to go over to Dan's home once a week, and so we always ate intermittently once, twice a week. And Maggie used to experiment on us, on different types of cooking. The one incident that we laugh about a lot is, she tried to make manapua at one time. And the recipe called for the manapua to be, I don't know for how many people, but she went according to the recipe, and so Dan had to eat some leftover manapuas for two, three days. [Laughs] But she tried out all kinds of cooking, and John and I tried out all kinds of cooking. And the two years that, John and Dan went on an accelerated program. There was, at that time, at the law schools, you could complete the law school curriculum in two years if you went throughout the year without taking summer vacation, now. So they went on that accelerated program and got out in two years. They came in one year later than I did, but they got out one year ahead of me. Well, not only that, because I served, I lost one year because as soon as I got to Washington, D.C., the following year we had the Korean incident. And being in the reserves, especially the artillery, I was subject to call, like my good friend Bob Katayama. He was also in my ROTC class, but he got called even though he had already entered into Yale. But in my case, I had transferred my reserve records to Washington, D.C. in 1949. So I was not in the University of Hawaii class that was called up as soon as the Korean incident was started.

However, while I was there in 1950, the field artillery, the artillery group of the army, as the Korean War started, found out that they had very limited trained motor maintenance officers. In fact, a battalion of artillery, two-and-a-half-ton trucks were ruined the first winter in Korea because the motor maintenance officer forgot to put in anti-freeze. And so there was a kind of an emergency in the army as to the artillery. And they reopened the motor maintenance school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and they asked for reserve officers to volunteer to go there. And I was advised by one of my Washington, D.C. reserve officers that it would be best if I volunteered for my motor maintenance school, at which point I would not be recalled immediately. So I dropped out of school after having registered in September 1950, dropped out in November, and from November to March of the following year, I attended the motor maintenance school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. And as a result, I lost one year of law school. By the time I got through with the motor maintenance school, the artillery did not need any more lieutenants for Korea, and so I was not recalled for duty to serve in Korea and I was able to finish law school as a result.

But Dan and John got through, actually, one whole year... I had a meeting, although I started a year earlier. But as I said earlier, I started to use my GI Bill when I started to go to law school which paid for tuition and books and gave us a subsidy of sixty-five dollars a month. And the number of months that you were entitled to depended on the number of years, months that you served in the army. So my entitlement was some thirty months, because I served thirty months, which was just one semester shy of getting through school. But fortunately my elder brother took care of my expenses the last semester that I was in law school. But in going to George Washington, a whole bunch of us, Donald Ching, Alvin Shim, Billy Yim, Shigeto Kanemoto, all of us did part-time work during the holidays, Christmas season as well as whatever breaks that we had during the school year, working for the treasury department or the post office. During the two weeks' Christmas vacation, we all worked at the post office. The others worked at the treasury department, part-timing, typing out mostly checks, as I remember, but I didn't do that because I had a part-time job at the bookstore at the university of George Washington. Almost like a full-time employee there, whatever hours that I had open, I would work at the bookstore. That's how most of us at Washington, D.C. were able to through our law school, all of us were involved in some type of part-time employment.

There were twenty, twenty-five of us, and we would always get together. And there was a Peter Coleman, later on became the governor of Samoa, he was attending Georgetown. And so he had, his sisters were over there, too, so the Hawaii group would get together and the sisters were good dancers and musicians. So for the three years that I was in Washington, D.C., going to George Washington, we had occasions to enjoy ourselves. It was at a time when the Hawaii club was developed throughout the Mainland. Graduates from Hawaii or students from Hawaii who went to the eastern, especially in the East Coast, had Hawaii clubs. I remember at one year, we had a very big aloha pageant at the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Oh, we had a king and a queen, and we had all kinds of delegates from all over the eastern coast, from Chicago, from Massachusetts, Hawaii kids coming over. And the pageant was a pretty big thing at the Sheraton in Washington, D.C. So it was not all study and work.

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