<Begin Segment 18>

KL: Tell me about eventually choosing your course of study and how you came to decide on that.

RF: Well, I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I always had an interest in architecture, but I wasn't, didn't think I could ever go to USC. And when I went for VA counseling, the lady said, "Well, you could still go to the School of Architecture at USC if you wanted to, because you have the GI Bill of Rights, and the GI Bill could support you with your school." So I said, "Oh, gee, that's great," so that's why I went to USC and got into the school of architecture. But I discovered a field called industrial design, which was in the architectural curriculum. And that was involving design of products, things you could hold in your hand, touch and feel, instead of buildings which were too big and too impersonal to me. So I decided to go into industrial design and was fortunate to have a wonderful career. And with all its ups and downs, many downs, many ups.

KL: You had some advice from one of your... I don't know if it was an advisor or a teacher, but you said you had two teachers who taught you particular...

RF: Oh, yes. Well, the field of design, architecture, was... it requires a pretty deep process of thinking philosophically as to why you're designing what you're doing, so you have a basis for your philosophy and approach to design instead of being superficial and being strictly artistic, and putting some substance behind it. To learn that process, you had to take a gardener, no artistic experience, no deep thinking experience into a course, which is tough and discouraging. And at the first, you feel like people are talking a different language, and you don't understand it. The philosophy is different, too deep for you, too abstract. And there was a guy by the name of Emmett Wemple who was teaching basic design. He and another teacher by the name of Byron Davis, most of them and Wemple who was more, had his foot on the ground, where Byron had, his philosophy was up in the air. But Emmett kept coaching me and kept encouraging me and convincing me that, you know, if I stuck through the hard part, you'd make it through it. And so with that encouragement I started to move forward. When I got into the specific field of industrial design, there was a little Italian professor, Sal Marendino, bless his heart.

[Interruption]

KL: This is tape 3 of a continuing interview here with Robert Fujioka on June 20, 2012. And you were halfway through a story about your two mentors in school, and we wanted to get to the second one.

RF: Then as I got in further into the industrial design curriculum, Sal Marendino, a wonderful Italian professor, had a real feeling for the emotions that a designer should have in the design process. And when you're going through the process of developing this philosophy, or doing philosophy, and the criteria of what you want to do when you're designing, you tend to get very serious about what you're doing. And he said, "Stop that nonsense. You have to be human. Enjoy what you're doing and let yourself feel what you're doing instead of being so literal in what you're doing." So he was always encouraging us to do that, stop being so serious and have fun, enjoy what you're doing. So it helped an awful lot to become a little more human in what you're trying to express in the way of inanimate objects for other people. So those two teachers were a godsend to me in building my career.

KL: And do you have a particular career highlight or something that really exemplifies your...

RF: Well, I've gone through an awful lot of interesting experiences from the time that I graduated, working with the wonderful companies and people. But the highlight of my career probably has to be Samsonite, the luggage manufacturer that they're known for. But they also built casual furniture, clothing furniture, they also built toys. And so it provided an opportunity for me to work with the original family who founded the company, two son in laws who were the spearheads, vice president of marketing, Emmett Heitler, and the vice president of manufacturing, Louis Degen, who believed in what I was able to do to a point where they supported me right away, and allowed me to deliver with my team of people at my company called Design West, the kinds of products that would be winners in the marketplace, and hopefully it was to the enjoyment of the ultimate user, the public.

KL: How did Design West come to be?

RF: Well, that's a long story. But from graduating I worked through a series of jobs, primarily doing a lot of freelance work. And my freelance work I ran into a company called Ampex in Redwood City, California. And Ampex was a large, successful tape instrumentation maker who was embarking on consumer products, and built the world's first professional audio tape recorder, which ultimately led to the Japanese taking over and building cassette recorders. But they were building a portable, suitcase enclosed audio tape recorder, professional tape recorder, wonderful technology. And they were housing it in a Samsonite suitcase. And when we designed the tape recorder for them, I said to them, "You know, your product looks like a Samsonite instead of Ampex." I said, "You need to make it look like Ampex." So they said, "Well, design us a case." So we designed a carrier case, and it looked like (Ampex). The Samsonite people were so alarmed at hearing that, they came to us and said, "What are you doing redesigning a Samsonite case when you could be using the best case in the world?" And I said, "Well, it may be the best case in the world, but it looks like Samsonite, and we need Ampex to have a look of their own." So we designed this case, and Samsonite made it, and they said, "Well, if you could be that convincing to your customer Ampex, why don't you join us at Samsonite and design all of our suitcases?" So that's how that happened. So, again, the blessings from above led us to that.

KL: Lot of confidence in you.

Off camera voice: Samsonite started, was in a wooden case when you started.

RF: Oh, that's right, yeah. At that time, Samsonite was building cases made out of wood and covered with plastic leather. And they were having a difficult time because structurally, with airline travel, they get more abused and more damaged, especially with the hardware (and they were heavy). And so we took them into what I call the airline age using more exotic, mass produced materials like magnesium, plastics, and different technologies that were mass producible in factories rather than handcrafted with wooden saws and everything else like that. So we were able to then design whole lines of suitcase, attache cases, and their other division had folding furniture, so we designed folding card tables and chairs, outdoor furniture, institutional furniture like these kind of chairs. Then they acquired the Lego license, so we started designing toys for them. And it was a wonderful career for twenty-five years.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.