Densho Digital Archive - Lury Sato Interview (denshovh-slury-01-0007)

<Begin Segment 7>

MH: Why did you leave camp?

LS: Because my husband got a fellowship to continue his work toward a PhD, and there I met a lot of people too. I met a girl with whom I still played tennis with until a couple years ago. Every week, we played tennis; that is, when we came back to Portland. And she no longer plays now, but we meet for lunch every now and then.

MH: Now where did you go, where did he go for his fellowship?

LS: University of Rochester. There we met another couple, Fukushimas, was also working for a PhD; and there was Joe Lynette was also from Russellville area and got his master's at Oregon State; and the Livermores, Janet is who I play tennis with. We didn't play tennis then. We had small children then. She had, Ronald was born, and she had a little girl, Barbara, but it was after a number of years that we both, she's from Reed and her family being in Portland, we got together here in Portland, and we started playing tennis together.

MH: Did you work at all when you were in, did you work at all when you were in Syracuse?

LS: Where, in Rochester?

MH: Yeah.

LS: Yes. University of Rochester has two campus. Women's College is where I worked in the library, in the service section, until I got pregnant. And then in 1946, January, I quit to take care of myself. He was born, my son was born April 12, 1946. My mother came to help me every time when I was pregnant, and it was, she had gone back to, came back to Portland in about two weeks or so. And then I had appendicitis, and I was in the hospital for a week and with a baby, but the baby was already on bottle. And about the same time, a friend, Ginger, had a baby a week before my son came, and she took over my son and put him in schedule. Before I had been up every couple of hours for him. Well she knew, she was a nurse, and she knew exactly what to do with the baby, and so he got straightened out.

MH: When you were in Rochester, did you feel any racial prejudice?

LS: I didn't, never felt that way anywhere except that one incident. Most of my friends had been Caucasian. I was the only non-Caucasian in the normal school. Let's see at the University of Oregon, yes, there was Michiko Yasui was a freshman, and we got together at YWCA, and we had lots of fun together.

MH: How long did you stay in Rochester?

LS: It was 1946, my husband got his PhD, and he got a job at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and he stayed there a couple years until after Sputnik. Government put lot of money in NIH, asked him, he made an application for government work, and he was asked to go to NIH. And there he stayed until, let's see, '72 when he passed away.

MH: So Rockefeller Institute, was that in New York City or --

LS: New York City.

MH: So you lived there for --

LS: About four years, I think.

MH: Four years. What was life like in New York City?

LS: We had a Japanese neighbor. We'd go together, and well, it's interesting. My friend Janet was also in New York, and Fukushima was also in New York, and we got together to do things. And of course the baby, housing was very difficult at that time. There's only a small studio room in Coney Island, so we took that for a time, and we stayed until second pregnancy. Paul was born, and the room was much too small, and we had to find another place.

MH: And did your mother again come and --

LS: Oh, yes. She came along to help us.

MH: That's pretty unusual for Issei.

LS: Yes. She did that. And also when Yoshio was very ill, I asked her to come again, and she did in a snowstorm, she did. A neighbor of mine picked her up at Dulles Airport and brought her to the hospital.