<Begin Segment 30>

MY: So I came back, and I graduated the following year in eighth grade. I was already put, I was put into eighth grade, I think I missed seventh grade altogether. I was in eighth grade, and then I graduated to go to Cleveland High School. And you graduated with me at that time. No, we weren't in the same --

TY: No, '41. I graduated '41 and you were still --

MY: Oh, that was high school. I was talking about Beacon Hill School.

TY: Beacon Hill School?

MY: You have that picture of you, but I'm not in it. So we probably weren't in the same class.

JY: That must be, yeah.

MY: But there were more than one eighth grade class, eighth grade class? Graduating --

JY: I wouldn't think so.

TY: Yeah, there were two classes.

MY: Yeah.

JY: Two eighth grade classes?

TY: I'm not, I'm not too sure -- I remember having the two class pictures, and I don't know what happened to the other one, but the one that I'm in, I still have.

MY: I have my graduating class picture, and we had, we had to sew our own dresses in a sewing class.

TY: Oh.

AI: For eighth grade graduation?

MY: In eighth grade, yeah. And so it's the most, it's the most amusing picture because all the hems are sort of like this, and all the girls', girls' dresses are awful. [Laughs] Because we didn't know how to sew, we had, that was our project. The eighth grade project was sewing our graduation clothes. And I remember everybody going, "Oh my God." But we had to wear our dress for the graduation picture. I might have that someplace.

TY: Oh, I wonder if that was true with our class, too. I didn't notice that, of course I didn't --

MY: Yeah, I was looking at that this morning, you know the picture you have? Where you were down here and everybody was up here?

TY: Yeah, yeah. [Laughs]

MY: And I was kind of glancing at them, and they look pretty respectable.

TY: Oh. [Laughs]

AI: So the two of you, then, both had your eighth grade graduations, and both of you went into Cleveland High School.

MY: Beacon Hill School.

TY: Well, the year I graduated, they changed the boundary line.

MY: They re-district.

TY: And so my older brother -- Mike was two years older than we are -- he was going to Franklin already. But the year I graduated, they changed the boundary line, and I remember in the school assembly when they made the announcement that, "You are going to Cleveland High School," and all the girls started bawling. I mean, they were just crying. It was a, chaos for about half an hour. [Laughs]

MY: Well, it felt like it was way out in boonies.

TY: Yeah, it was a country school. It was a, Cleveland High School was the newest high school there --

MY: Right by Boeings airfield.

TY: -- brand new school.

MY: Was it --

TY: It was toward Boeing --

MY: Yeah.

TY: -- in south Seattle. And it was, to us it was out in the tules, and we didn't want to go to that country school. We wanted to go to Franklin High School. But of course, we couldn't. So --

MY: And then we took a bus by the, that grocery store.

TY: By the Beacon Hill, that district there, we transferred over.

MY: Yeah.

TY: Well, we walked up to there.

MY: We walked to there and then we took a bus from there to school. And it was a long ride to school. I mean, it was --

TY: Well, now it's nothing, but in those days it seemed, it was considered, in those days, I think, it was a long ride. Must have been at least four miles.

MY: Oh, that's not very much.

AI: You were saying that when you were at Beacon, that there weren't that many Japanese Americans in your classes. What about at Cleveland?

MY: No, the only Japanese Americans at Cleveland High School were the farmers' kids.

TY: Well, there were a lot of -- in South Park, there were a lot of Japanese farmers at that time. And so there were --

MY: There were a few.

TY: -- a handful of Japanese. Not like Broadway or Garfield or Franklin, but there were oh, maybe, maybe about one-eighth of the class, students were Asian, and Japanese.

JY: That's still a lot.

TY: Huh?

MY: That's still a lot, yeah.

JY: That's still a lot, one-eighth of the school.

TY: Well, that was, it was, I think it was a lot more than --

MY: But I remember that Mike, at Franklin High School, Kenji Okuda -- that our parents knew a lot of the, the kids who went to Franklin High School, the Japanese American kids who went there, were friends of our parents.

TY: Yeah.

MY: But at Cleveland High School, our parents, we didn't know any, have any family friends whose children went to Cleveland High School. I remember that, the distinction. That Mike knew a lot of kids at Franklin High School who used to -- that we used to know from Japanese school, or people that my dad knew. But in Cleveland High School, these, the students who were going to Cleveland High School were, seemed to be in a totally different part of the city. Or they were, it wasn't maybe geographical, but it was probably that they were farmers.

TY: Well, it was partly geographical, and then they were farmers.

MY: Yeah, so the, so we didn't really become friends with very many of the Japanese Americans in Cleveland High School. Did we?

TY: No.

MY: Remember? The only person was Elsie Yamashita, and she was, went to Beacon Hill School with us.

TY: And Hiro Eguchi was one of our neighbors, too, I knew him, but not really well. But that's only one that, only person I really knew in --

MY: Yeah.

TY: -- Japanese American that I knew in Cleveland High School.

AI: So, although you didn't have a lot of Japanese American classmates at Cleveland High School, still it sounds like you were, still kept in touch with the Japanese American community, partly because of your father's activities.

MY: And we also went to Japanese school.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.