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SS: But then after, I think, the first year, life kind of settled down. People would, were making furniture for their units. They were putting in vegetable gardens so they would have fresh vegetables. I think the first spring, they started allowing leaves for people to go out and work on the farms nearby like the sugar, sugar beet farms and that kind of thing, and people were going out to work. Also, they had a program so that college students, if you could get accepted to a college in the Midwest or East Coast, could also go out. So in March of '43, I left to go out to Sterling College which was a United Presbyterian, which is a United Presbyterian School in Kansas, in Central Kansas, and I was sponsored by my original church back in Granger. It's a small church-related school in rural Kansas, very different from our large state university. I remember getting on the train out of Heart Mountain and traveling by rail to Kansas. And as we neared Sterling, I happened to look out the window, and here was this weather beaten painted sign which said, "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you within the city limits." And this was the outskirts of Sterling, Kansas, and I thought my goodness, what am I coming to? But you have to remember that in those days, Kansas, Nebraska were border states and probably maybe worse than the Deep South because in the Deep South, the African American always knew what his place was, whereas when you got up into the border states, it get to be a little iffy, and so here was this sign notifying them. It was kind of unnerving because I thought, oh my goodness, you know, what kind of reception am I going to get here

Well, the school was, the people were very nice. Unfortunately, the roommate that I was teamed up with was a young lady who was... I don't know how you would call her, probably ultra-conservative, middle American. She took one look at me and decided that I needed to be converted; so she, you know, started in on me, and I asked her not to do that. I didn't need to be converted, but I guess she thought I was some heathen from some far off land that needed to be converted to Christianity. The second day, she kept at it. So I finally went to the lady who was the dorm mother, I guess you would call her the dorm mother, and I told her that I would like to have a different roommate because I didn't think I'd be compatible with this one that I was assigned to, and that she was trying to convert me to Christianity, and I didn't need to be converted. I was a member of the Presbyterian church, and that's how I got there to the school. So she said, "Well, let's go back and talk to this lady," this roommate's name was Dorothy, and she said, "Let's go back and talk to Dorothy and see, you know, if we can work things out. If not, we'll have to find you another roommate." So we went back to the room and the dorm mother was explaining to Dorothy how she perceived the problem and what did Dorothy think about all this at which point Dorothy went into an epileptic seizure and fell to the floor and scared the wits out of me because I had never before witnessed someone who was, you know, having a seizure. So the dorm mother decided that maybe this wasn't the right room for me and assigned me to another room, and that was my initiation to this college from which I graduated.

I had a very nice three years there. It was probably more conservative than I would have liked, but then, you know, I could live with it. For instance, we had vesper services every Sunday. Of course we went to church all day Sunday, practically. Wednesday nights, we had some kind of prayer service. But I had a couple of professors there who were very good, and I thought very knowledgeable, and I had a very interesting experience two years ago. One of my best friends at Sterling College, we had corresponded for a few years after we left school, but like all good things, we kind of lost touch with each other, and it had been over fifty years when my sister called me one day, two years ago and said, "I have a letter for you." And I said, "Who's it from?" and she said, "Well, I don't know." She said, "It's got your name on it, but it's in care of our address." So she said, "You want me to put it in the mail or shall I just bring it when I come?" I said, "Oh, just bring it when you come," because we see each other couple times a week probably, and it was very interesting. Lois, this, in fact, she and I had roomed one year at Sterling College, had gone to the National Japanese American Museum in L.A. Louis happens to live in West Hollywood. She said she decided that she was going to make it her mission to find me after fifty, I think it had been fifty-four years since we had last seen each other, and she said that she had gone, she knew that I had been in Heart Mountain, and so she, apparently they have records there at the national museum where you can try to locate people. So she said she found our family and the unit where we lived, but there was no recent address or anything like that, of course. So she took down the names of all the families in that particular barracks at Heart Mountain, and she said she decided that she would start with the L.A. phone directory and see if she could find any of the names in the phone directory. Well it happened that Tom Hide who is from Toppenish and who had lived at the end barrack, end unit in my barrack or our barrack, has a nursery business in L.A., and she was, he was one of the names that she had found at the museum. And so she called, and she got him one day, and he said, "I don't know where she is, but I know where her sister lives," because my sister had gone to a Heart Mountain reunion a couple years before that." I had not gone to the reunion, and Tom had talked to my sister and had gotten her address, and so he said, "I will give you her sister's address and you can maybe get a hold of her," and so Lois had written this letter to me in care of my sister, and we were able to get together. The next time I went to L.A., I have a daughter who lives in Orange County. So the next time I went to L.A. or to visit my sister, I called Lois, and we got together and had lunch and spent the day, and we're going to do it again this year. So that was an exciting kind of remembrance of my college days in Sterling. So you never know what can happen.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.