<Begin Segment 23>

KL: The only other question I had, and we're...

KN: Who am I?

KL: Yeah. I've already kept you ten minutes past our thirty minute limit, we're forty minutes, but as much as you want to say about who are you.

KN: Well, I'm me. I can tell you I was born in Pasadena, California, born and raised, went to Manzanar and back from the second grade to junior college and went through the Pasadena school system. When I was fourteen my parents got divorced and I lived by myself ever since. Some of the interesting things is I went back and visited my high school later on, and the office help at the high school says, "You're the only one I know that had thirty mothers." See, I used to go get girls' handwriting to sign my excuses. These girls, I should have known they knew. They were keeping all these notes, you know, and they were laughing, said, "Look at this, they're all different." They never turned me in. And so that was one thing. So I was not a very good student, unlike the rest of the family. I went to school playing sports, so I went to college as a phys ed. major. I got hurt pretty bad playing football in junior college, I had no feeling in my right arm, left arm, for five years, so I had to change my major. So on a lark I changed it to engineering and went to my advisor and she said, "You can't do this." I said, "Why not?" She said, "You barely passed Algebra I in high school. You have no prerequisites." So I sort of dolefully looked at her, I had the arm in a sling. I still remember her name was Mrs. Evelyn P. Lowe, and I said, "Oh, Mrs. Lowe, I sure want to be an engineer." She says, "Okay, I'll go talk to the calculus professors to see if you can get in." So he didn't think I was going to make it, so he said, "Okay, I'll let you in." Well, obviously, the rest is history. I scored the top score in the class on both midterms and the final. So I became an engineer.

I went from City College to San Jose State, bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering. In the process I went to work for Lockheed. That's where I met my close friend, Sam Araki, he was a first line manager there. And I worked for him for a while and after I got my degree, I decided I'd rather work in computers. So I went to go work for IBM, and ended up running, developing technology that sort of dictated their strategies in the '70s. Then they sent me back to school, and they actually sent me back to school at forty-one, and I went to Stanford and got a PhD. And then after that I found out I couldn't help IBM very much anymore because they were changing from a hardware company to a software company. So I left with twenty-four and a half years. I would have invested in my retirement at twenty-five, but I left six months early on a handshake to take a job at this little startup called Solectron. And the guy says, "Well, I want you to take this over," and so over the next few years I took it over. And when I went there, the company was a ninety-three million dollar revenue company, one location, fifteen hundred people. We grew to eighteen billion dollars in ten years with over a hundred thousand employees. We won two Malcolm Balrige national award, quality awards. The whole company did, which was never heard of. So we got branded pretty well. Then I retired in 2004, and so I served on a lot of boards, AT&T and a few other boards, [inaudible]. I sat on the, I guess what they call the economic development board of Singapore, international advisory committee. And so I've done some stuff on boards and stuff.

And then I decided to start this company. All along, I realized that agriculture in the form it was non- sustainable. Where I picked that up was I spent fifteen years in Santa Fe Institute. They're a think tank that works on theoretical problems of complexity. And if you look at agriculture, it's one of those problems of complexity. You can't diddle with one, and you don't do nature like that. And so we got a pretty good feel for how you have to deal with nature, so I thought California has a problem with both water and land, land use. So you could see where we did a prototype here and we raised money and now we're building a full farm. So that's my life. But I was fortunate in having a lot of very good people work with me, so I've been pretty lucky.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.