Friends Along the Way

Abstract

By his own account, sociology provided my father a good run. Looking back, it was possible for him to discern in his career the rising fortunes of the field itself over the second half of the 20th century, which lifted him during a bright period of ascendance in the 1950s and carried him through decades of professional satisfaction to the safe shore of a distinguished retirement and comfortable pension. That it had all worked out so well for him in the end was a genuine source of wonder and gratification to my father. His upbringing in a Japanese immigrant community in Los Angeles provided scant basis for envisioning a life of academic scholarship, yet he lacked in his adulthood the imaginative power to conjure even a single alternative path his life might have taken. Indeed, though his early scholarly work on educational opportunity among minority students spoke to a pre-occupation with the social pathways that led to success, my father preferred to view his own professional trajectory as the unanticipated product of chance and fortuitous friendships. Stuck in a dead-end job with a furniture distributor in Boston (to which my father had improbably migrated following detainment at a Japanese-American interment camp during the Second World War) and desperately wishing to return to his native California, he sought advice from his former instructor Edward Post. Post was an English professor and poet, who had become a de facto mentor to my father during his undergraduate years at Boston University. Whether through considered assessment of my father's interests and skills, or because it was one of his few connections in Los Angeles (likely the latter), Post made the fateful suggestion that my father look up Leonard Broome, a friend and sociologist at UCLA. Broome, having determined that my father would make a useful research assistant on a project about Japanese-American wartime internment, suggested it would be easier to hire him if he were a student. On an upswing in the flush times of the post-War era, the Sociology department soon