<Begin Segment 9>

MM: Let's go, let's go back to Tufts College, you were sent there.

RK: Yeah, as the newly elected student body president of McKinley High School, they sent me to the National... it was the meeting of the National Council of Student Body Presidents, High School Student Body Presidents. And it was held at Tufts College in Medford, Boston, Massachusetts. And for me that was a very delightful trip. I took the Lurline and sailed from Honolulu to San Francisco, then got on board the Challenger in Oakland, went to Chicago. And then I took a side trip to Niagara Falls and that was an experience. On the train over, going to Niagara Falls, these salespeople come, come over to try to sell you excursions. And I thought everybody went on an excursion, so I bought -- [laughs] -- I got talked into buying this excursion. When I got off, I found out I was the only one. They put me in a limousine and of course I was nattily dressed. I thought on the mainland everybody wore a suit and a tie, so I had my suit and a tie, and lo and behold, I was the one being escorted around Niagara Falls in this limousine. And every time I got off, people took pictures of me, thinking I was a foreign potentate or something. But it was a delightful trip, and I got to see Niagara Falls close up, Maid of the Mist and all that. Anyway, continued to Boston, and at Boston I remember (being delighted) because I saw squirrels for the first time. You read about 'em in storybooks in Hawaii. And I was interviewed by the Boston newspaper people as the person who had come the longest distance to the conference. And when I began to speak, they kind of dropped their pencils and said, "Where did you learn your English?" I said, "Well, in Hawaii." They said, "You have a slight Boston accent." I said, "Well, maybe it's understandable because our teachers came from New England." Hawaii, although it's closer to California, if you look at its history, the missionaries that came to Hawaii in the early days all came from New England. So it's no -- and a lot of our teachers were from New England.

MM: So even though you had traveled the farthest, in many ways you were a hometown boy.

RK: [Laughs] Yeah, I guess they thought so.

MM: What was that like for you? You were seventeen years old. You had never left the Islands before, and now, not only were you leaving the Islands, you were going clear across the United States. What was that like for you?

RK: Well, when I look back, I know my mother was worried but I wasn't worried. You're a confident seventeen-year-old looking forward to new adventures. And the world was a rather safe place then. We didn't have any terrorism, as far as I can recall, so just looked forward to it, and it was a delightful trip. At the conference I became good friends with, with several people from mostly the Midwest. There was Fred Schmidt from Milwaukee, who was very well-educated, sophisticated, and by golly, he had a, he had a car. See, his dad had bought him a new Mercury, and he had driven from Milwaukee to Boston. And there was Bud Alcorn from Chicago and there was another person from Cleveland. And the four of us got together and we bummed around New England, went all the way up to Bangor, Maine, sleeping on the side, eating lobsters, and having a great time. And then ended up in New York, where Fred really introduced me. In Boston, Fred took me to all these bookstores and his hobby was collecting rare books and so that was an education for me to see this very sophisticated lad shopping for these books and going to these bookstores. And in New York, Fred took me to the plays and we saw Saroyan's Beautiful People, which I didn't quite understand, and we saw a musical comedy, Hell's A Poppin'. And the show that I remember best was Ethel Barrymore in The Corn is Green. If you know the story, it's about education, basically. And Fred and I went to a matinee, and we were very impressed with the play and with her performance. So Fred says to me, "Hey, let's go and meet Ethel Barrymore." I said, "Oh, Fred, I don't think we can. Look at all these ladies out here waiting to see her come out. We don't have a chance." As we were talking, a gentleman comes up to us and says, "Boys, do you want to meet Miss Barrymore?" Fred said, "Of course, yes." "Come with me." It was her manager, so we, he escorted us in to her dressing room and we saw her, chatted for a while. She signed our programs. So that was a great experience in New York. And then from there we went to Washington, D.C., where we saw the sights: Congress, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument. And then we all, we drove to, back to...we dropped one of 'em off at Cleveland and then we drove on to Chicago, where Bud and I got off and Fred went on to Milwaukee. And from Chicago, I took the train to the Grand Canyon. I remember stopping at the Grand Canyon, and then eventually ended up in Los Angeles before I sailed back home.

MM: This sounds like it was a very expensive trip in the sense that, certainly for you to be traveling around. How did you get the money to go on this trip?

RK: Oh, yes. As I recall, the trip at that time, the whole thing cost about four hundred dollars. And I remember getting this, I don't know how long it was, 8-feet-long bunch of tickets from the travel agent. But the four hundred dollars was gotten by the... having a spring football game, to which admission was ten cents, so four thousand students paying ten cents equals four hundred dollars. That's the way it was financed.

MM: So it was raised by the school and --

RK: Yes.

MM: -- raised by the community itself. Let's go back to The Corn is Green because you mentioned that that really had an impact on you, and it is about education. It's about a teacher who reaches out to a student. Why did that make an impact on you? What was appealing about that to you?

RK: Well, first of all, unlike Saroyan's play, I understood this one. [Laughs] And of course, I guess I've always thought education as being very important, and here was a good example shown very dramatically how a teacher can affect a person's life. In this case, how she could spot a poor person's -- it's the miner's son who is very talented, but along with talent comes all of these problems, but how she could help him nourish that. And I thought that was a beautiful story.

MM: So even as a young seventeen-year-old boy, that appealed to you?

RK: Yes, it did.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.