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JK: And then when you came back to Portland, did you continue your schooling?

AO: Yes. So I came back, and it was the summer of '47, and I didn't know what I was going to do, but I wanted to go back to school. My sister Minnie was working as a nurse at a surgical hospital, Matson Memorial Hospital in Portland, and she was a surgical nurse. And she says, "Why don't you come to the hospital and see what the doctors do? Maybe you can be a doctor, because it's a very interesting profession." I said, "Sure, okay." So I went with her to the hospital. They let me change to the green uniform, cap and mask, and I sat next to an anesthesiologist there, he was very kindly and showed me what he was doing. The surgeon was very kindly and told me he was putting in a replacement valve in a patient's heart. And it all was just fascinating to me because I'd never been exposed to anything like that before, so I decided right then that I wanted to go to medical school. So I went, had to take general chemistry, and I hadn't taken chemistry, which is, of course, one of the first-year courses for medicine. And so I took that at Vanport University, or Vanport College, which became Portland State University. So I spent the summer at Vanport College taking a general chemistry course. And I transferred to University of Oregon in Eugene. And I had a hard time because all the veterans had come back from the war, and there was no housing, no more housing available at the campus, so you had to find your own housing, approved housing, or not go to school. So I asked what's approved housing, they said, "Well, you can work as a houseboy at some family, and that's approved, and you can then go to school." So I became a houseboy at a doctor's family there in Eugene. And so I was a babysitter and vacuum cleaner work, and weeder at this doctor's house for a year while I went to school in pre-med there.

JK: In our pre-interview you had a story about an expectation the wife had at dinnertime, and it was just kind of a cute story.

AO: Yeah, they were, as I say, this was a doctor's family. The doctor, incidentally, was the team physician for the Oregon, University of Oregon football team. So he was kind of up there. But at any rate, his wife wanted to have a, kind of a fancy household, so whenever it was time to have dinner, she would ring a bell from the dining room, and I would come out from the kitchen to see what she wanted. And when I came out, I had to wear a white dinner jacket to make it look like I was really a waiter. So that was the formal part of my duties. The informal part was playing with their two boys, they had two boys that were young, like eight or ten, so I used to babysit and play with them. So I had an enjoyable time.

JK: Did the doctor know that you were interested in becoming a doctor?

AO: Yes, they knew.

JK: So they were supportive.

AO: Yes. So the second year I was down at Eugene I transferred to the campus, 'cause it was veterans housing available, so I stayed there.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.