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GK: Then finally after eleven years as the science specialist, I was offered a job with some school districts as a curriculum director or something, and the state superintendent, in fact, I signed a letter of intent with Multnomah County saying that I'd become their curriculum director which would have been a promotion, and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction said, "You're not leaving us," you know. And I says, "But I signed the letter of intent." And he went and contacted the superintendent of the Multnomah County Education Service District and says, "Blah, blah, blah. You're not getting George." And so I was released from my letter of intent, and the superintendent promoted me to conduct a, direct a research project at the state level. And so I left my science position, and I became the Director of Dissemination. If you ask, "Well, what's that?" you know. It doesn't sound too nice. But at that time, it must have been 1971 or thereabouts, there was a lot of education, educational research was being conducted in all the universities throughout the United States, and they weren't being used. They were being conducted and filed away. And so this is when they started to put together all the research studies into a computerized format, and they started what they called the Eric program, E-R-I-C program. And so this Eric program contained hundreds of thousands of research articles in every aspect of education, but it wasn't being used. And so we, three states were selected to come up with a system whereby we can get all of this research into the hands of classroom teachers so that they would change their teaching styles and improve their teaching strategies. And so North Carolina, Utah, and Oregon were the three states that were selected for this experimental study. And so we worked on this for three years and developed computerized retrieval systems, and we had developed an extension service-type system to get these extension agents out to teachers and classrooms to help them locate articles that would solve whatever problems that they were encountering.

And so we started the system, and that was very interesting. What was more interesting is that not only were people interested in this system in the United States, but they were also interested in it in Europe. And so there came a time when they were going to hold this big meeting in a 13th century abbey, 35 kilometers outside of Paris, and so who was invited to go? I was invited to go to this meeting, and people from Norway and France and Great Britain and a number of countries were represented there. And we were isolated in this, really the ruins, castle ruins. Half of it was in ruins. The other half, we had our conference, and that was just fascinating to be in a foreign country like that and in that setting because in the library, they still have books on book stands that were written by hand. And for our dinners, we had about three or four wine glasses out there. And the way they do it is they have one kind of wine at one time of the meal. And as you get through the meal, you have different kinds of wines, and they serve coffee in soup bowls. So you had to pick up the bowl, and that's how you drank coffee. But it was, it was an experience. And that conference, I can't recall how many days it went for, but I thought here we are, stuck in France, and this meeting's going to be held for so many days, what's everyone going to do after the conference is over? I wanted to tour Europe because I was there, so I was asking around. I couldn't find anybody who was staying after the conference. They're coming right back to the United States. And I thought, gee, how ridiculous. Until I came across this Mormon guy from Salt Lake, and I said, "Werner," I says, "Are you going to stay after the conference?" He says, "Yeah." He says, "I have a car. I got it all rented. I have to make one stop in Brussels. Otherwise, I'm free." I says, "Can we team up together and kind of make a little swing around, down the Rhine and around France?" And he said, "Sure." And so here, we're on our way from this, France and up through the countryside into the Brussels, into Holland and over to Cologne, Germany, and down the Rhine. But on the way, it was kind of warm, and we're getting thirsty, and we wanted something to drink, and so we stopped in some kind of a tavern, and Werner is a Mormon, you know. He's not supposed to have any alcohol. And so far as I'm concerned, I says, "I'll have a beer." And so my beer came right away. And he says, "Well, do you have any lemon juice or lemonade?" And the guy is saying, "lemon juice, lemonade?" He finally said, "citron." And I says, "Yeah, citron, order some citron, whatever it is." It sounded like it was lemon or lime or something like that. And so he says, "Oh, I'll have a citron." And it didn't come, and it didn't come. And finally when the waiter came by with this tray, he grabbed a beer off the tray, and he drank it, and so that's how he quenched his thirst. And that night we went to, or one of the nights, we went to this old tavern, and it was so old that the beams across the ceiling, you can see the axe marks on the beams. That's how old it was. And it was just fascinating to just be in a place like that, having your cheese and fruit and your wine. And I said, "Gosh, I have to get a picture of this." And so I said, "Werner, sit there, you know. We'll take a picture of our eating here." And he sat down, and he saw that wine, that bottle of wine. He moved the bottle of wine out of the picture, and so we have a picture of our eating in a tavern without the wine showing. But we had a great time.

When we got down to Heidelberg, we stayed with some friends of mine who, he was a doctor in the army, and so we had to sleep on the couch in the living room. He had two couches, and so we went to sleep. And the next morning, I got up, and there's no Werner, and I thought, gee, where did he go? And so I got dressed. I went outside, and he's walking up and down the sidewalk. And I says, "How come you're out here walking?" He says, "Well, I got up early, and I didn't want to awaken you, so I came out here, and I thought I would go for a walk." Okay. We let it go at that. But years later, he came to visit me in Salem, and he says, "George, do you remember the time when we stayed in Heidelberg and I was walking on the sidewalk outside?" I says, "Yeah." And he says, "Well, that night, you were snoring so badly that I couldn't sleep that I had to get out of there." Poor guy. Instead of telling me to be quiet or turn over or something, he let me snore, but I didn't know a thing about it until years later, but that goes to show what good a friend he was.

But, so that was one of the fringe benefits of working with the state agency. Eventually, the funding of the dissemination project was cut off, and so I started working with instructional technology. Computers were just coming into style for the schools. So, and then we wanted to improve the library programs, and so I took over coordinating that program. That, all of these assignments were very interesting. And in the final years, I coordinated some of the federal programs. We were still getting federal programs into the state. And I retired officially in 1984, at the end of 1984. What happened was I wasn't planning to retire, but I had worked in Portland for nine years. And when I left Portland, at that time, the retirement program in Portland was different from the state retirement program. And so when I left Portland, I had to take out my retirement credits, so I lost my nine years of credit that I had accumulated in Portland. And I was with the state for twenty-five years, and so retirement was the furthest thing in my mind, you know. I still had to go for some years. Then I got up one morning, and in that one day, the state legislature had passed a law that made it legal for those of us who had worked in Portland and who had lost our retirement from Portland to buy it back. And so overnight instead of just twenty-five years of retirement, I had thirty-seven, thirty-four years of retirement, and that meant that I could retire tomorrow, you know. And so at the end of 1984, I retired officially from the department with full retirement benefits. They offered me a part-time job to stay on with the department to work six hundred hours a year or something just on my own, and I wouldn't have to attend any staff meetings, or I could choose the days that I wanted to work. I can take the days off that I wanted to take off and go on trips. I thought, well, I can't have it any better than that. So I worked for the department for about eight years after I had officially retired. And it got to the point where I thought, well, what's the use of driving down to Salem from Portland, all that distance. So I finally gave it up completely in about 1992.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.