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So in that way, it was kind of a chance event that I met my wife. She was a year ahead of me because she had gotten a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati in microbiology, and she was working towards a master's at Berkeley. And at that time, people in the biological sciences that involved lab were now mandated to take biochemistry, and it happened that there was only one biochemistry course in the fourth year. And it was both for majors, like I was, chemistry major, versus students from other disciplines that had to take chemistry. So I met my wife, believe it or not, at a biochemistry lab. She happened to have a lab bench in her room separate from mine, because we were all separated by alphabet. And there was a guy named John Tashiro who was next to her who was Japanese American, and we were sort of casual friends. But I began to visit him so I could overlook and see who this other person was, and I discovered to my surprise and relief that they were not dating or anything, they were just labmates because of the alphabet. So I began to develop the courage to socialize with her, and a couple things fell into place. One was that she was the first Asian female that I ran across on a social basis who was a scientist already. But most of the females that I ran into up until that point were history majors and sociology majors and English majors and so on, all in the humanities. So this woman was the first female scientist with a degree already, so that caught my attention. And then as we got acquainted with each other, I found out that, I don't know how it came out, but she was interested in the stock market, which was also unusual. And because I had gotten the bug from my father who decided at some point when we were growing up in Gilroy that he needed to increase the assets of the family, and so began to invest in the stock market. So I got, in fact, I was still in high school when I bought my first shares of a company called Ford Motor. They had gone public in the mid-'50s, and so I bought, I think, ten shares of Ford Motor with my name on it, even. Although my father had to countersign it because I was a minor. Anyway, so that was an experience that I anticipated.

And so there were two things that kind of rang a bell with this woman. None of them was interested in classical music. I had not run across male or female Asians who were that knowledgeable in classical music. And the reason for that was that when Sumi, my wife, was a student in Cincinnati, she lived with an older sister who was a piano major at the music school in Cincinnati. And living in a house like this, every day, somebody's practicing this or that or this or that, and so over time, she acquired a rather elaborate, I guess is the right word for it, knowledge of piano sonatas and classical music. And just by chance, when I was in middle school, I got an interest in classical music even though I never studied music, I can't read music or anything, because I was listening to my mother's LP recordings of classical music. So I got interested in that, and through high school, I listened to radio and or recordings. And so when I discovered that with Sumi, I thought, wow. So those three things have stuck with us as long as we've been married, which is over sixty-one years. Because right now, we've been subscribers to the Philadelphia orchestra for over thirty years since we've been in Philly. And so it was one of those things that just kind of happened.

How did we get married? Well, I had a decision, I made a decision to make a big date in San Francisco in spring of 1961. And bought tickets et cetera, we went to the concert, and we came back to her apartment and visited for a while before I went back home. I was living with my parents at the time in Santa Clara, so she had an apartment in San Francisco. Anyway, during our conversations back in her apartment, there was a pause, and she said, "So, are we getting married?" And I was dumbfounded by the question because that was the last thing in my mind. And after a pause, I said, "I guess so," and then she said, "Okay. Well, what I'm going to do is" --she was working temporarily at that time as a culture manager for beer brewery because she was a microbiologist, and beer has yeast and all that. Anyway, so she was working there, and she said, "Well, I'm going to quit my job in a few weeks and then go back to Hawaii and plan our wedding." I said, "Okay." [Laughs] And time comes, she had things set up.

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