Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Joe Yasutake Interview
Narrator: Joe Yasutake
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 9, 2002
Densho ID: denshovh-yjoe-01-0017

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So it, it really wasn't until we moved to Cali-, well, my first wife died in 1984, and while we were still in Denver, and so I stayed there for a couple years after that and continued working, but I just felt like I was ready to move on. So I retired. They were gonna move the laboratory that I was associated with down to San Antonio, Texas, and I decided that that was not someplace where I wanted to live, so I was eligible at that point to take an early retirement. And my wife had just died, and I decided that maybe it was time to just do somethin' else, so I took that early retirement. And I stayed retired for a while, for about six months or so, and realized -- I was in, see, I was about fifty-four at the time, and I thought, "Well, it's not -- I'm not quite ready to, you know, just play golf all the time," kind of thing, so I took a job with Lockheed, and that's what brought me out to California. And I got remarried at the time. Just right after I moved to California I had met a former friend of my wife, my late wife's, who I just kinda knew casually, but we just kinda got to know each other quite well after my, my late wife had died. And finally we got married in 1988, about a year after I came out to California.

AI: What's her name?

JY: Her name is Judy, and she's Chinese. She's actually from New York City. She was born and raised in New York City, and she -- so, and she has a daughter. I have a stepdaughter now who's a senior in, in college, and she -- we got married in '88, so I think her daughter was about the fourth grade or so when, when we got married. And when we came out to California -- actually, because of my stepdaughter, and my wife is very, very much of a churchgoer and she wanted to find a church that had a nice program for kids, and it just so happened that the Japanese -- at the United, Wesley United Methodist Church, which is in San Jose, is ethnically probably 85 percent Japanese, Japanese American at this point. And so we started, started going there to, to the church there, and that's when I started to kinda reconnect with my Japanese American-ness, if you will.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.