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JB: Today is June 20, the year 2000. And this is an interview with Joe Frisino for Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. Our narrator is Joe Frisino. And Steve Fugita and Jenna Brostrom will be the interviewers, and Dana Hoshide is our videographer.

And Joe, I'd like to begin this interview and just ask you to talk a little bit about your early childhood. And if you could tell us when and where you were born and what was your full name at birth.

JF: Well, I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 2nd of January, 1919. My folks named me Joseph Francis Frisino, and I didn't like the Francis, so when I was confirmed, why, I took as confirmation name Charles, which was my -- I had an Uncle Charles, my Irish Uncle Charles was my favorite uncle, favorite person. And so I took his name, so then I gradually switched around to Joseph C. So, I consider my name now as Joseph Charles Frisino.

JB: Okay.

JF: That's kind of a long way around the horn, but that's exactly what happened.

JB: Good. I'd like to ask you also about your grandparents. And start, if we could talk about your grandparents, and where they came from and how they came to America.

JF: My mother's, my mother's parent, parents both came from Ireland. My grandfather was, was Robert Drane, and he had died before I came on the scene. My grandmother was Catherine Barry Drane, and since my, since her husband had died, she came at sometime, apparently right after he died, to live with my mother and father. And she lived with us just about up to the time my mother died in 1940. She was with us all the time, although she had two sons and an, another daughter still living.

It must have been, must have been tough, but I, to have -- on my father's part -- to have his mother-in-law living with him all the time, but I think that was just a, I mean, looking back, you would think it would be difficult. But I think that was just such an accepted mode that it never, never became a problem. I mean, that was, if your father-in-law died, you took your mother-in-law in. That's all, all there was to it. Whether or not my father got any financial support from any of her, of any of my grandmother's other children, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think any of the others were -- probably my father, who was a finish engraver, probably made as much money as anybody, maybe more. I never, I've often thought of that, and they seemed to get a, get along in kind of a neutral way that, well my Irish grandmother, she was a, not a particularly gabby old lady, but she was, she was capable of holding her own in a conversation.

But she was not an interfering type of person, except with us kids she would, she would have her way. And I can still hear her saying, "Oh, what a nice ball. Bubby, put it away. Put it" -- Bubby was my nickname -- "Put it away and save it. Save it." She wanted me to save everything. She never had anything when she was growing up, and so material things were rather, I guess, became important to her. And she was trying to convey that fact to me that if, if you don't take care of things, they're going to disappear. So I think from her I got some of my habits of preserving, keeping things. Like my baseball glove, for instance, when I finally did get one, my father got one with cigar coupons, and I've still got it. And when I was a kid, at the end of the season I had a little wooden box that cheese came in. It was about three and a half inches square, about yea-long, and -- you've seen those loaves of cheese. They came in neat little wooden boxes. And I had that lined with some cloth from my mother, and I'd oil my glove and put a ball in there and then form the glove around the ball and put it in the box and nail the box closed for the next season. So I always knew where my glove was, and I knew it was being taken care of.

Well, I did that for years and years. I've still got a train, electric train that my father bought me when I was six years old. And I've got some of those boxes as well because I always put the -- I wrote on the box which car came out of it, and I've always put the cars back in the box, put the, put the smaller boxes into the main, main boxes and, until the next time we would play with them. I got that, and some of that is flipping through to my kids as well. They, they preserve certain things fairly well.

JB: And that was from your Irish grandmother, you think?

JF: Yeah.

SF: Did your Irish grandmother pass on any kind of Irish cultural things, you think?

JF: It's hard to say because if, if she did I wasn't, I wasn't aware that this, that this, was a way things were done somewhere else. My Irish grandmother made bread all the time. She was the bread, she was a good cook. My mother was an excellent cook, and, but my grandmother would make the bread. And that was -- I don't know if you've ever experienced that when you were -- but having a loaf of bread just right out of the oven and slather it with butter, there's not much better than that, or not much that smells better when it's cooking. But we had hot-water heat in there, in our house in the outskirts of Baltimore, those long, low radiators. And there would be a couple pans of bread raising on the, in the wintertime, on the, on the radiators.

But, as far as any -- she was with us all the time. So it wasn't a matter of going to Grandma's house and she did things this way or that. She was there all the time. So it's like she was just, just one, one of the family. And there was, no particular things stands out, except of course her, she was a devoted Catholic. So she, my father never went to church, but my mother was a devout Catholic and so... but the things that, her children all, all my grandmother's children really liked her, loved her. And there was a, quite a few times in the months of, they, my Uncle John or my Uncle Joe, or my... well, we used to go to my Aunt Mary's quite a bit, she didn't come out. But they would come out on the bus, on the trolleys, to see my grandmother, spend a Sunday afternoon and so forth.

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