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AI: Okay. Well, today is July 3rd, 19 -- July 3, 2000.

CO: Yes.

AI: We're here in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on the Tule Lake Pilgrimage with Mr. Charles Olds. I'm Alice Ito with the Densho Project, and videography by Steven Hamada. And, Mr. Olds, thank you very much for being with us today.

CO: It's my pleasure and privilege.

AI: I wanted to ask you to go way back and tell us when and where you were born.

CO: Well, I was born in Japan in Karuizawa, which is today a luxury resort for upper-level Japanese people. But in my day, it was the place where, a summer resort for missionaries. My parents were missionaries in Japan. My mother had been born in Japan. Her father was a very early Christian missionary. He and Joseph Nijima founded Doshida University in Kyoto.

AI: And what was your mother's father's name?

CO: My mother's name was Genevieve Davis Olds. She, my father was, they were married, he was from Beloit, Wisconsin, and went to Japan as a missionary. And he had met my mother in, during the course of their schooling, so they would, they had something in common. They wanted to go to Japan as missionaries, and particularly because my mother's father had gone much earlier. And so that's how I came to be in Japan.

AI: And what year was that that you were born?

CO: In 1913. Yeah. And I have always had -- I went to school at a Canadian school called the Canadian Academy in Kobe. And I graduated from there in 1930. I was sixteen and went on to college. And I grew up learning the street language of Japanese. I had a lot of Japanese kids as friends. I thought it was too bad that the school that I went to didn't have courses in Japanese. However, I had enough to converse with some people in very simple terms. After that, I went on to college and...

AI: And where was that? Where did you go to college?

CO: I went, that was in 1930. And incidentally, I came to, back home to the United States with my oldest brother. We crossed the Soviet, the Soviet Union then. It was Trans-Siberian Railroad. And we went to Berlin, and it was a, since it was a year ending in zero, we went to Oberammergau and saw a passion play, which occurs once every ten years. Anyway, then I went on to school at Oberlin College in the U.S. My interest in, in the Japanese always remained. I had, I always liked to have a chance to talk with visitors from Japan, and I still do. [Laughs] I remember where I lived, which was Portland, Oregon, I used to play tennis on the public courts in Washington Park, which is right below the Japanese Gardens in Portland. And a lot of Japanese tourists would come by, and I would hear them talking and I would casually make a comment. And they'd stop and be amazed to hear one of these tennis players was talking in Japanese. So I'm, I had that fun.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.