Densho Digital Archive - Kinge Okauchi Interview (denshovh-okinge-01-0012)

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RP: This is tape two of a continuing interview with Kinge Okauchi. And Kinge, you were sharing with us some stories about your love of mathematics in high school. You said you were also a puzzle solver, too.

KO: Yeah, yeah. I liked puzzles. At that time, jigsaw puzzles were the rage, so I worked a lot of jigsaw puzzles. That got boring after a while. [Laughs]

RP: Were you, were you also tinkering with mechanical things, too?

KO: Oh, yeah, yeah. The toys I had at home were mechanical, more or less. I had an electric train I learned electricity from, and learned, learned that perpetual motion machines didn't work. [Laughs] I tried to make one once, and it didn't work, obviously.

RP: A lot of kids that age used to build their own little crystal radio sets.

KO: Oh, yeah. And that's how I got into electronics and stuff. But electronics, crystal radio set, and vacuum tubes. We had an old radio that I took apart and made use of just before the war. In fact, I got into the radio amateur club in high school at the end there, just before graduating. And I learned a fair amount of electronics then. But that worked out pretty well. And so it did build up my background for the engineering school.

RP: And so you graduated in the summer of 1941?

KO: Yeah, June.

RP: And what were your plans or aspirations after high school? What did you go and do?

KO: Well, couldn't afford to go to any fancy college at the time, so I went to San Jose State, which is a state college. About all it cost me was books and nominal tuition. Transportation was the biggest expense, I commuted from school. Wound up commuting on the railroad track on the peninsula there. And that was another one of these things where we had a little clique on the train. Those of us that were in the science and engineering curriculum, we had three or four people that commuted on the same train all the time, so we would do our homework on the way back to school, home from school, the afternoon's homework. And then the next morning, we'd finish, that evening we'd finish the homework, and then next morning, we'd check each other out on the train going to school, and we would have our homework done. So again, like I say, I was doing a little bit of scheming. Actually, we all did that one. We got our exercise going from the train station to the school.

RP: How far was it?

KO: About a mile or something. We walked, buses cost money and the other one was that buses didn't run properly on time, so we walked that mile. And that worked out pretty well. We could barely make the first class, the train that we took.

RP: And were you able to get through a semester at San Jose State before the war broke out?

KO: Yeah, yeah, it was a quarter, the first quarter. And I dropped out of school at the end of the first quarter, 'cause that was about the time things were falling apart. So I was, just dropped out on a regular basis instead of dropping out in the middle of the school year or anything like that. That kept my paperwork, you might say, pretty well under control.

RP: So you didn't lose any time.

KO: No.

RP: You were, kind of later on, you were able to come back and pick up your education.

KO: Yeah, later on, all I had to do was sign up for the, you might say, reinstate myself at the class and pick up where I left off. And that worked out real well.