<Begin Segment 35>

LH: Before the break we were talking a little bit about, we were trying to get into this, but your life after returning to Seattle and going to high school. It's a big chunk of time really, but if you could just talk a little bit about what was your life like finishing up Bailey Gatzert and then going to middle school and then high school.

FG: Well, obviously, not obviously, but if you go from Bailey Gatzert to junior high school, it's still the same group, right, in the same community so you have basically the same friends. And so I think for me, my junior high, my junior high school experience, was really very positive. The teachers were always really very nice, very helpful, and very encouraging. And I don't think there was anything, I couldn't... I mean, I don't remember anything racial about it excepting that every time a new person came into the class, we'd kind of sit there. It was quite, one thing about Bailey Gatzert and Washington Junior High School and Garfield and Franklin at that time right after the war, they were pretty cosmopolitan, a lot of different ethnic groups. And one of the things that used to happen or had happened when I was in junior high school, somebody new would come into the class and so we'd kind of sit around, my friends and I would say, "Well, is that one of yours or is that one of yours?" I says, "It's not one of mine. It's yours." [Laughs]

LH: Meaning what though exactly?

FG: Sylvia Nomura came into the room and so there was, my girlfriend was Chinese and then there was a Filipino girl and so we kind of all looked at each other, and I just decided that Sylvia was not, Sylvia was not Japanese. She was, but to me she didn't look Japanese. I didn't recognize her. Foon said, I says, "She's one of yours." She says, "No, she's not." So then we decided it was a Filipino girl. [Laughs] Anyway, that was Sylvia, is a full-fledged Nisei, [Laughs] but I didn't know. It was very, it was very cosmopolitan and scholastically it was interesting because we were all coming back from camp and so our standards were from camp because, see, when we left camp, we were in the fifth or sixth grade. And then we brought that into junior high school and so school was... I don't know. Easy? I don't know if it was easy, but we had a pretty good foundation. And so we were, I think most of the Nisei were kind of competing with each other more than anything else.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.