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VY: Yeah. I was wondering -- if I may -- I was wondering when the two of you got married, where did you live?

JT: Oh, you know, we were dutiful young children. We lived equidistant from Berkeley... George is from Berkeley, I was from Alameda, so we bought, we had an apartment in Oakland equidistant from our parents. [Laughs] And then we bought a home the next year in Oakland. But the thing about that, that was in 1969 and it's quite relevant now, because when we moved into that home, I didn't know it was an Italian Catholic neighborhood. And so the day we moved in, we had friends, family, all ages and nationalities, including our fathers who were gardeners, they were chopping down hedges and this and that, washing windows. And the phone rang and the neighbor next door called and she said, "Yep." I didn't know her, but she said, "Yep, I always said, first the Orientals, then the..." N-word. And I got down on my hands and knees and I'm bawling, crying, and George came running and he said, "What happened?" And I said she said -- and I didn't know her -- she said that. And I said, "I can't live here." Of course, we did. We had the house, but we stayed. So just like me, I decided, okay. So that next year, or that Christmas, we moved in April, but that Christmas I invited all the neighbors over for a Christmas party. And I found out that they had never, they didn't know each other hardly, and they had never been in each other's homes. So it was, you know, it was just the kind of neighborhood you move into, they didn't interact or anything. So I think they came just to say, well, golly, what kind of life did they, you know, who were they? But after that we started becoming more friendly. And then the next year, I met a girl up the street and we started a block party. And that was in 1971, I think, '71. And we started a block party and invited people from two blocks, and it's still going. From '71 to now, I don't know how many years, that's almost fifty years. And they still have a block party, and I feel good about that. I think that's... one of the things I'd like to do is to make people feel valued. Having felt, having not felt valued sometimes, I think that's the most important thing, to make people feel valued in one way or another.

VY: What's interesting to me, too, about that story is you moved into that neighborhood that was so different than the neighborhood you grew up in, but you kind of brought a little bit of that, your neighborhood into this neighborhood in a small way and kind of planted that seed and it's still there.

JT: Yes. In fact, we still have that house. I'm having it prepped to sell. I decided to sell that house, but the neighbors come out, and we don't know, we know some of them, but there are no longer anybody there who lived there when we, in 1971. But they still have the block party and I haven't gone. I should try to go, but I don't know anybody. But that might be fun, I should come there and say hey. But life is full of twists and turns, but there are a lot of u-turns, too, so maybe I'll make a u-turn and go this year or next year.

VY: That would be fun.

JT: Well, there were no children in those days, and now there are twenty-three in the neighborhood, twenty-three kids. Well, it's been fifty years, so I'm sure everything's changed more than once, two generations. Let's see, you asked me one other thing, and I forget, about my family. No, I think I've talked about that. My church, I think the church, we couldn't escape church because it was just three doors down. And my mother was like, that was her second home. She would go there every day to make sure that everything was right, and she probably felt like she owned the church because she was there from close to the beginning. Well, I said she was like the welcome wagon lady, she would bring people home to our house to meet at Safeway and she'd say, "Are you Japanese?" And if they said yes, then she'd invite them home for coffee or tea and they became part of our family, almost, it happened like that. And so everybody knew my mom and dad, and, of course, the six kids for good and bad reasons. [Laughs] My brother, Kent, when he was a little boy, he was in his Boy Scout uniform. And I remember answering the door, and there was a policeman there. And Kent was standing behind the cop and he said, "What happened?" And they said he was throwing water balloons on the way home from his Cub Scout meeting and he had on a Cub Scout uniform. [Laughs] And the reason he got caught was he was so chubby, he couldn't run as fast as the other boys in their Scout uniforms. And we've teased him ever since then, he was chubby. We still laugh about that, those were good childhood memories. But the only time the police came to our house, as I recall.

VY: That's good.

JT: Yeah, that's a good record.

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