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RP: So you came back to San Francisco in 1947?

MK: Yes.

RP: Roughly. And so your parents had come out of camp.

MK: The, because the camps closed in...

RP: '45.

MK: '45 I think. Oh yeah, because my younger sister finished high school in 1945. And they left camp after that. I don't remember exactly what month it was.

RP: What did, what did your husband do in camp?

MK: He was teaching. He taught history and math and then in the summer he would, they had summer camp for high school people. And he went out. I don't remember if he... I don't remember what year he left camp. 'Cause that was '43 I graduated. He must have been there a couple of years and then he went out to Milwaukee. He didn't like the job there so he went to Chicago. And like I said, he worked for Hall House. And that was a settlement house so to speak, and they created a job for him there. What he had been doing was he was teaching, he was working in the gym at Sears at that time. They had a physical program going, physical ed. program going. And then he got his draft notice in Chicago so he came back to Topaz because he wanted to be with all his friends, in the same group. And they went to Texas for the basic training. And from there they went to Fort Snelling. And they had a real fast course in Japanese. You were supposed to have some knowledge of Japanese and he had very little knowledge of Japanese at that time. But he had picked up enough that he was able to work with the occupation in Japan. He worked censoring written material and the mail and stuff like that. And then he worked with the schools. Because they had to teach English. Yeah. And then he took a civilian job for about two years. And then he decided that he had been gone from home too long already. And he had to get back. So I think he was maybe close to four years or something he was in Japan.

RP: And did you know him in Topaz at all?

MK: I knew his sisters. And no, I didn't associate with him in Topaz. And...

RP: So how did you two meet up eventually?

MK: Well, because I would be visiting his sisters. And when he came back from army and everything then I, we got to know each other then. But besides, he always had his girlfriends anyway. [Laughs] No, he came down to, after he finished Berkeley he went to USC. And so he went back to San Francisco and worked for... oh gee... he had a job counseling with the Catholic church. I can't tell you where it was though. But he kind of had a falling out with the Catholic church about birth control. And he went to work for Children's Bureau in Los Angeles.

RP: And what was that? Was that an adoption agency?

MK: Let's see... we got married in '53, 1953 he went to work for the Children's Bureau in Los Angeles. And like I said, I was working for an insurance company at that time. And when we were bringing home the same paycheck we knew we couldn't make a go of it that way. So using Cal-Vet and GI Bill he went back to SC and got his teaching credential. Then he kept going to school at night to... at that time you had to have... he was lucky he got... people pushed him into administration. He wound up as a counselor. You had to have teaching credential for grammar school all the way through high school if you wanted to go into these other fields. And plus the fact that your pay depended on your taking I think two credits a semester. Like one class at night. So he did that for years until he hit forty-two and he said he was tired of going to school. And then computers came up. And we figured the future was in computers rather than being a vice principal. And so that's what he did for L.A. City Schools. He set up the report cards, all the, I think attendance was switched over to computers eventually. He... they used to program all the classes by hand, and then that went on the computers. So he stayed with the computers until he retired, 1986.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.