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SS: After I graduated from Sterling, I got a fellowship to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I... they had a specialty there in rural sociology. I was a sociology major in college, and so I was going to study, do something in rural sociology and cultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina, and that was a very interesting experience of course because I had to leave, I left Sterling after school was out because I enrolled for a summer session at Chapel Hill and took the train, I was taking the train to North Carolina, and I had to change trains in Lynchburg, Virginia, and got off the train, and I had a couple hours' wait. And as I walked down the train platform to go to the waiting room, I noticed these two signs and one said "white" and the other said "colored," and I thought to myself, "Which one do I enter? Do I go in the 'white' or do I go into the 'colored'?" And the same for the bathrooms, they were marked "white" and "colored." It really was kind of scary because, you know, from what I had heard, you know if black people went into the "white" areas, you were, you know, it was a strictly a no-no. So I finally asked somebody, somebody standing on the train platform, and this lady said, "Oh, you can use the 'white' bathrooms and go into the 'white' waiting room," she said. So that's what I did. So that was my first encounter with the Old South.

Chapel Hill was a very interesting place. In those days, probably the only real liberal spot in the South. There were a lot of Jewish students in Chapel Hill in those days, and I was told it was because there were quota systems in the northern schools for Jewish students, and so it was rather difficult for them to get in; whereas, down in the South, there was no quota system for the Jewish people, but they just didn't allow blacks in, so they would come to school there. I found the situation a little disconcerting at first because I lived off-campus that first summer, and as I was walking to class, there would be all these black young people just standing, staring at me, you know, and I thought, oh my, here I am, allowed to go to this school. They live here, and they're not allowed to go to school here. It was really uncomfortable for me. And, you know, it wasn't until the Civil Rights Movement, and they then were allowed, you know, equal rights to go to school. I dated an Egyptian fellow for a while, while I was there, and our first attempt to go to the movies was slightly disconcerting because he had to go up, and, he was told he had to go up and sit in the balcony, but I couldn't go up in the balcony. I had to sit downstairs where the white people sat. So we turned in our tickets and decided we wouldn't go to the movies. It was a learning experience, a very interesting experience. It was kind of a hurtful place, you know, when you thought about what they were really doing to the blacks. In fact, for a while, I considered leaving, but then I thought, well, I had a fellowship and that was the only way I could go to graduate school, so I better stick it out and make the best use that I could have. So I did stay, but it was a really interesting experience.

The second summer that I was there, I went up to Philadelphia to work for the American Friends Service Committee and spent the summer writing, actually we produced a book on the National Student Relocation Commission, and that was the group that arranged for scholarships and arranged for Nisei students to attend colleges, leave camp and go to school; and of course, the American Friends Service Committee was very active in that whole arena, and so I spent that summer collecting data and writing the history of that movement. That was a very interesting experience. After two years in Chapel Hill, then I went to, up to Seattle. My family was now relocated in Seattle and -- oh, I forgot to mention that I had met Walter at the Portland Expo Center, and we had kept in contact. He had gone his way, and I had gone my way, and he was a student at the University of Washington, and so we got back together. I worked, I think, for a year as a teaching assistant in the sociology department at the University of Washington, and then I had a friend who was on the faculty of the sociology department at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. And he said to me one day in almost kind of like a joke, "You ought to go to Hawaii and teach." Well, he knew that I was waiting for Walt to graduate. We were going to get married when he graduated, and he had one year more to go. And so this friend said, "Well, why don't you go to Hawaii? I can get you a job teaching at the University of Hawaii, the Hilo branch." He said, "They're going to open a new branch this next, this fall." So I said, "Okay." I thought that would be interesting, so I agreed to go.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.