P: Just after Japan surrendered?

R: Yes.

P: You had enough points by that time to get out?

R: Yes.

P: Where were you at the end of the war?

R: Well, when I finished my tour in New Guinea, I had been there fifteen months. I
 got there in the summer of 1943, I came home in the fall of 1944, and I was sent to
 Tucson, Arizona to train navigators.

P: So when you returned from New Guinea you are stationed in the U.S.?

R: In Tucson, and stayed in Tucson until I was discharged.

P: You leave service now. You come back to Pittsburgh?

R: Yes.

P: And?

R: Well, I am ready now to go back to school, but all during the time I was in New
 Guinea I thought about what I wanted to do. I studied and read, and I decided I
 wanted to be a journalist.

P: Yes. I thought that was an interesting switch from engineering to journalism.

R: I tried to find out, when I came back, where the best schools of journalism were.
 With everything that I could find out, three names kept surfacing. Columbia
 [University] in New York, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern
 [University], and the University of Missouri.

P: Yes. I think that was and is [the best].

R: So when I got home, I wrote [to] all three of them. Columbia invited me to come
 to New York to visit, and I did that. I had some friends in New York that had been
 discharged when I was, so I had some people to visit. And I went and did all the
 things Columbia asked me to do, and they said, "Okay, we will admit you, but not
 until next September. We have such a backlog." Well, I had just been out of school
 now for over four years and I did not want another year, so I said, "Well, thank you."

 Then I wrote to Northwestern, second choice, and they wrote back and said, "Unless
 you can tell us in advance you have a place to live, we cannot accept you because

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