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MN: When you look back, what percentage of the students going to GW at that time were veterans?

KM: A good number of them. In fact, I think all of my contemporaries were veterans. But yeah, one year, the first year, I remember I worked at a YMCA camp for young YMCA children near Annapolis. There was a summer camp, I worked there for six weeks taking care of the kids at the summer camp, just like at Palama settlement. And then the following year, I remember, this is a good one, learning experience for an up and coming lawyer. I saw an ad asking for carpenters. And having worked as a carpenter's helper during the war, I thought, oh, that's a good thing for me to do, and I went down to the employment office, the Washington, D.C., found out who the employer was, signed up, and for two weeks I worked at the construction in various spots, I don't know where they were, nearby Maryland and whatnot. And somehow, during the first week, I noticed that people were coming around the working sites trying to locate and talk to our foreman. And I didn't think much about it, but then, after the end of the first week, I didn't get paid, nothing. Thinking funny, you know, I understood the pay would be once a week. Any rate, I worked through the second week, and I noted that the second week there were more people coming to the job sites looking for the foreman, and I never knew what it was all about. Then I found out that the end of the second week, again, there was no payment. And so I found out, I talked to one of these people who were at [inaudible], they are trying to get paid for work done. Evidently, it was a scam. Because I never got paid for the two weeks' work that I did, and it was getting up five o'clock in the morning and reporting to work and working eight hours for two solid weeks I did. But that was a good lesson learned. As a law student, I didn't know enough at that point to go to, to complain to anybody. But I thought it was a good experience and I didn't do anything about it. But it was a tough lesson learned. Two solid weeks of working at a construction site without getting paid.

MN: And those days, did you folks just generally stay up there without coming back to Hawaii?

KM: Well, I did, because after I got through with my tour in Fort Sill, I went back to Washington, D.C., and found out that I couldn't reenter at that point, it was the middle of the semester. And so having been in the reserve, I could fly on a space-available basis with MATS, at that time it was MATS, military transportation system. So I was able to fly East Coast to West Coast on the MATS for seventy cents, that was my lunch, which I had to pay for, but that was on a standby basis. Unfortunately, this was in the midst of the Korean War, so that flying between Hawaii and California was full at all times. And so I couldn't fly space available from California to Hawaii, so I had to fly back commercial. But then I got all the way back again to Washington, D.C., for the summer session, or September session, anyway, on the MATS airline again. I was able to come back in the middle of my term. But most of us, we never could afford to fly back. Whatever time we had, we did some part-time work.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.