<Begin Segment 20>

AC: Well, after you came back, you went back to the Oregon State agricultural college on the GI Bill, met your wife at this leap year dance, and after she finished her degree, you started several years later than she.

PS: Yes, right.

AC: So you never finished your degree. What were you studying?

PS: Ag engineering, that's what I started out in.

AC: You have any regrets about finishing your degree?

PS: Oh, yeah and no. Because I was, had a business waiting for me. After I got married, the farm was there, and my two brothers were farming, we farmed together before the war and everything like that, so it was just a matter of coming back and becoming part of the farming operation. And so, no, I didn't wish I could go and finish, get my degree, although I did sometimes, but it wasn't a major problem. I was happy that my wife was able to get her degree. Oh, there's a little story there, but I'll let her tell it. [Laughs] Anyway, it wasn't that difficult for me. I had a house to go to and things like that, we were pretty fortunate.

AC: I want to fast forward now to when all this talk began surfacing about redress and things like that, did you have any feelings about that at all?

PS: Not really. I guess I thought it was a good thing that kind of compensation, the redress, I thought it was a good thing. It came awfully late, there was people who should have received it. By the time it was passed and was ready for recipients to get it, why, a lot of them had already passed away. I thought it was a justified thing. Because you think back of all the things that the evacuees lost, they were only allowed to take two suitcases or something like that, and the people that, the farms and the homes and stuff that they left behind, and things that people never were able to get any compensation for it, they just lost it. And so they were taken advantage of. I thought it was too bad it wasn't something that happened a little bit earlier. I think, I don't remember how many years, it was after the war ended, but it was sure a loss to a lot of people.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.