Joe Ishikawa was a Japanese-American who was born in Los Angeles and interned during World War II in Colorado. He left the internment camp to enroll in graduate school at the University of Nebraska. There, he met Olivia Brandhorst, a German-American who had led a cloistered life in several German-speaking communities on the Great Plains where anybody not a German Lutheran was considered an "outsider." Although their upbringings could have hardly been more different, they shared common values and overcame considerable opposition to marry.