<Begin Segment 6>

RP: How did you meet Ralph?

MS: Well, he was in our church, and I guess I first met him at a Sunday school party. But I was one year ahead of him in college, and he also went to the graduate school at Pomona. But he took one semester off and went down to UCLA, but he finished at La Verne and then he was in science, he was a biology --

RP: Biology teacher.

MS: Yeah. And so he got a master's in... well, I guess it was biology. 'Cause I know I spent one summer, we spent one summer down at the beach, and he was studying his sea animals and he was recording the color of them, and that's what his thesis was all about. (...) But I had to do a master's, too, and mine was on probability. And I had a teacher at Pomona who was, it was the first year he was teaching. And to get a master's, you had to have an oral examination, and they brought a teacher out from UCLA. And I know Hugh Hamilton, this guy's name. He happened to be gay, but I didn't know it. But he was scared; he was more worried than I was. Because if I made a mistake and I didn't do very well, it would reflect on him. But I guess I did okay, I got it anyway.

RP: So Ralph was in your, member of your church, and you were working up at, in Westwood, and you got to know each other a little bit.

MS: Well, we'd known each other before I went up there. And actually, we got engaged, I guess the second year I was up there, because he had another girlfriend when I first knew him. But she married somebody else, and so he cried on my shoulder and we got together. And, of course, Ralph and I had the same attitude toward doing social justice stuff. And so we felt the same about that.

[Interruption]

RP: You guys were married, where?

MS: Well, we were married, you know, I told you about this Congressman Voorhis, were we talking about that --

RP: Right.

MS: -- since you've been doing this or before?

RP: We talked about it before, you said he was --

MS: Well, Voorhis had a school down by San Dimas, and they had a nice chapel. And there was a big window that you could see the mountains, and I know we set our wedding time at sunset. 'Cause at that time, you could look (out of) this chapel and you could see the mountains, and the sunset on the mountains was pretty. Well, the chapel is still there, but they let a whole bunch of trees grow up and you can't even see the mountains anymore. But we got married in Voorhis chapel, and Ralph's father was the minister, and he performed the ceremony. And we lived at this little house in Pomona that my mom bought for eighteen hundred dollars. We had a reception out in the backyard, we had a big grass backyard.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.