[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]
<Begin Segment 6>
HH: Obviously you didn't spend the rest of your life at Bergenfield. What happened, what are the events that eventually took you out of there?
KI: Well, I went to school for a while down in Virginia after I graduated from high school, that was the same year that my dad died. He died just shortly after I graduated from high school. And at first I wasn't going to go on to school, I was going to stay at home and work, but my mother and my uncle said, "No, you've got to go to college and you've got to get an education. That's what your father wanted." I said, "Well, what are we going to live on?" There was no income, my father had a limited amount of insurance, and that was it. I think my mother got some social security benefits, but that's about all she had. "Oh, we'll get along fine." So I went away to school for a while, and sure enough, I'd come home or find out, gee, there's food.
HH: What school did you go to?
KI: Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. So I was down there for a year, I didn't do too well down there. And I came back and I told my mother that I was going to get a job and work and take care of the family needs and go to night school. And brother who was just under me, younger, he was graduating from high school, and so he went on the Air Force Academy. And I think he was maybe the, he may have been like the second Japanese American in the Air Force Academy at the time. There was one other fellow from Hawaii there, and so he was appointed to the Air Force Academy.
HH: Did it take a lot of work to get in there?
KI: Yeah, but we had a lot of help. We had help from Mr. Parland, and New Jersey Senator Case helped. That's where my brother got his appointment, and he just recently retired five years ago, six years ago, as a full colonel, was stationed at the Pentagon. So he had a pretty good military career. And I got married. I married a girl that I had met when I was just about a year out of high school, I had met her, she was from the next town over. That took me to East Orange, New Jersey, and then eventually my job took me to Long Island. And from Long Island, we moved down to South Jersey, and that's where we've been since 1972.
HH: In South Jersey?
KI: In South Jersey.
<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.