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MM: I've heard you also talk about the resources in the library, the periodicals that were made available to you.

RK: Yeah. That's, that's, that's a delightful memory. I liked to read newspapers and magazines. I still do. And at McKinley, each so-called homeroom had a stack of magazines. Some of them were the popular magazines. I think it was Photoplay was one of the popular ones. There was Reader's Digest, but they also had, of all things, they had magazines like Amerasia, The Nation, which were quite, well, thought-provoking articles. And we, so we got an exposure to that, which is something we normally wouldn't get in our homes. We were lucky if our parents subscribed to the daily newspaper, but here we were exposed to different points of view, different perspectives. So in many ways those magazines opened our eyes.

MM: Was there any criticism of the choice of magazines? For example, The Nation could be seen as a kind of leftist publication.

RK: I don't recall. Although, I must say that Miles Cary himself was accused of being a Socialist and so forth.

MM: You became active in student government as a sophomore, as you mentioned, became student body president -- sophomore president. But then you, as a junior you ran and were elected to student body president.

RK: Yes.

MM: What motivated you at that time? What, what were you thinking?

RK: I don't know what I was thinking, but I was well into student government and enjoying it and so my friends said, all said, put me up to run. And so I got elected to be student body president. And that was a memorable experience. To begin with, McKinley High School sent its student body president to an annual national conference, and I was lucky in that the conference I went to was held in Boston the summer of 1941 at Tufts College, now Tufts University.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.