<Begin Segment 19>

JC: So I think we're coming to the end of the interview.

SN: All right, fine. Good.

JC: I'll ask you once again if there's anything that we've left out or some juicy story that we've forgotten about or anything else that you'd like to say before this ends.

SN: My experience in going to New York was very good. It was very, very enlightening. I learned a lot, met another kind of population, very heavily, heavily, a very diverse place. There, the first time I saw a lot more blacks than ever before, many Jewish people, large Jewish community, and had opportunity to work there a while, a short time at Federated Department Store place and learned that windows dressers are all gays. No, really. Window dressers at Lord and Taylor were all gays and worked with them and learned about gays, gay people and men. Gays are men. They had a staff of, they had a staff of twenty-four people working on doing window dressing and do it once a week. Have you ever been to Lord and Taylor? You know their window, okay. They do it once a week, and there is one woman working there, and she's the secretary to the head window dresser, and so what I did was clean the mannequins. Mannequins were not, mannequins in those days were paper mache, so they got dirty very easily. So I had to clean those and the mannequins, and I ran upstairs around and so on. When you run upstairs, you got to tell the guards that you are coming up there to get it because they have these boxers, not boxers, what's the other vicious dog, guard dogs?

JC: Dobermans.

SN: They have the Dobermans running all over the department store every night because you know why, people sneak in and stay behind in the department store to steal something out of the store. The man was there telling me, "Go and get this hat," or get this or that. I was a gopher in doing that, and you work the middle of the night. And then at the end of the day, end of the night, it would be about 4 o'clock, 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, these, all these gay men would put women's hats on, shawls or something, and dance around.

JC: So there was a lot of diversity in New York and a lot of tolerance in New York?

SN: I worked in a post office, and I can't imagine the bundles of Reader's Digest. I tell you, I had to pick up those big sacks of Reader's Digest and sort them out, Reader's Digest. After that, I never wanted to see a Reader's Digest in my life. [Laughs] Because it came down from New York in trucks, they are published in New York, sent out all over the world. So I had a lot of, I think that I'm very fortunate that I had a lot of experience in doing so many different things in my life, so that helps, that helps.

JC: Sam, thank you very much for this interview.

SN: Okay.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.