<Begin Segment 7>

RP: I think you told me earlier that your, did you have another aspiration or career goal?

MS: Oh, going to, designing, 'cause I was good, at high school I did a lot of sewing and I loved it, and I had a teacher who had studied in France, Paris. She really saw that I had potential to go into the custom designing, but my folks didn't want to me, they wanted me to go to medical, 'cause my great grandfather was a doctor, my grandfather was a doctor, I had two uncles that were doctors and two dentists and my cousin married a doctor, and so our whole family's in the medical field, so my mother was, took nursing, but she really didn't work too much. But she went to nursing school so she wanted me to go into something medical field, so she talked me out of it. And of course I liked math and chemistry and all that, so I could go on, otherwise, you can't go into pharmacy without being interested in chem, so luckily I enjoyed it. And then I made pretty good money in it, 'cause there were, pharmacists were kind of scarce then, so I was able to get work. I never looked for a job. I was, people were looking for me.

RP: Which year did you go into USC?

MS: I went in, see, I graduated 1930.

RP: 1926 or...

MS: Yeah.

RP: Did you have a scholarship or any other financial help, or did your parents...

MS: No, I stayed with a family, helped them wash dishes, helped with dinner, got free board, then I worked at a pharmacy after school 'cause lot of time we got through, usually classes lasted early part of afternoon, so I worked to get my practice.

RP: Where, which pharmacy did you work at?

MS: It was called, it's in, it was a Little Tokyo pharmacy, and I worked in a Rexo, Rexo Pharmacy for a while. You know the old Rexo Pharmacy group?

RP: Was the pharmacy field open to Japanese Americans during the time that you were going to school? Did you feel like you had any type of future in that field?

MS: Well, it was hard. Lot of people couldn't find work, but I lucked out.

RP: What happened?

MS: And not only that, they didn't girl pharmacists were not very well-known then, so it's hard for women to get a job, but so they wouldn't let me work out in the front. I did all the prescriptions in the back.

RP: This was your first pharmacy job out of USC?

MS: Yeah, I had to, they didn't sell anything. I did some, but they always made me work in the back, filling prescriptions. In those days we had to measure liquids. It's not like pulling pills off the shelf those days. We had to mix lot of things, like powders and liquids. And so I liked to do that and so I didn't mind working in the back. My first job, I got seventy-five dollars a month, and when I retired in '70, let's see, '73, I was getting seventy-five dollars a day. And now you know how much pharmacists get? Girls are making eighty to a hundred thousand a year. That's why, I understand, I read someplace in the medical field about a good, almost half are women going into medical field. Dental students, same thing, and in the pharmacy they said half the students are women now. Like you go to the hospitals, there are a lot of women doctors, 'cause it's a big field for the women now, and it's good money if you can make it.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.