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LR: You were very involved in the union.

MR: And I was involved with the union, yeah, and I was, we had a half a dozen, a group of people running drill presses, big drill presses, and the drill press was like ten foot long or something, and ten feet high and maybe seven feet that way, and I was down, they thought it was really so funny because I was so small. Anyway, okay. So I would go to the meetings of the union, big union meetings and things like that, and I was pretty active. And then they were going to have a meeting for, there was going to be an election for union reps. I was running for the rep on our group, for our group, and the guy who was the present rep just retired, so the place was vacant, it was a vacant seat. So that guy came back from retirement and came back to work so that I couldn't run. [Laughs]

LR: See, this is an example of the racism that you say that you never...

MR: I guess it is. I never noticed it, I just assumed.

LR: She always says, "Oh, I've never experienced racism."

MR: It happened, and I just --

LR: But deep below the surface. So I was the one who was conscious of the racism, and she walked down the street and people were yelling things at her. People would make their eyes like this, people would shout horrible things, I didn't even know what it was, but I was very conscious of how she was treated.

MR: I was just so used to it. [Laughs] That's the way it is, but as long as they didn't really come after you, didn't have much of that.

LR: One of the memories that I have was of two big guys saying something to my mom, I don't remember what it was, and my mom getting up in their face and saying, "How dare you say that to my son?"

MR: That must have been when I was involved with Yellow Seeds. [Laughs]

LR: I don't know. I was scared, myself, but I was also sort of terribly proud at the same time. I was amazed at how you stood up to these folks, too. Yeah, so I have a lot of memories of being treated... I mean, you dealing with racism, literally daily racism.

MR: Probably. One thing about my experience in the drill press thing is, well, since I was in the union, and as people came back from Vietnam, I was laid off. But the union gave me a scholarship, a pretty good scholarship. So that's how I got, went back to college, because I was working, I think Saburo had an insurance policy or something or other, and there was something for me, or maybe it's just a government thing for people who were killed or something. I got some amount of money from the government, and then I got this scholarship, and that's what got me, that's what I used my tuition for college for at, I think I went to Temple.

LR: I think we graduated at the same time. [Laughs]

MR: Just about the same time, right.

LR: So embarrassing to have to see your mother on campus. I was so embarrassed.

MR: Yeah, because I was working the drill press in a gear company, I said, "Oh, I want to be a mechanical engineer." But you have to be very smart and good at math to do that. I wasn't very good in math, so I sort of worked to... oh, I could get something in civil engineering technology, which is not, you didn't have to do quite as much math. I think if I can quit, I think I took one of these math courses and said, I can't possibly manage this. But I could at a lower level, so the engineering technology did not require the math that mechanical engineering required. So I was able to do that, and of course, by then I had gotten myself back into drafting, which was civil engineering, civil drafting, highways and things like that. So I was able to, one way or another, finally get a four-year degree in civil engineering technology or whatever it was.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.