During the summers, Bob visited his cousins Dennis and Judy Kanegae in Santa Ana. Judy remembers that Bob would take a bus, train, or hitchhike out to California from Chicago. She thinks that he even jumped a freight train one or two times and rode it all the way from Chicago to Santa Ana. Bob was with the Kanegaes when he met June Wada. June described taking a short cut through an artichoke field and seeing a very handsome young man walking towards her through the mist.

June and Bob were married in 1960 and moved to Berkeley, California.