Densho Digital Archive - Mitsuye May Yamada Interview (denshovh-ymitsuye-01-0017)

<Begin Segment 17>

AI: Well, to return back to the scene of Chicago, in the meantime here you're continuing your graduate studies at Chicago and was it this point that you were -- excuse me.

MY: Let me get a tissue, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, right, I was in Chicago and we kind of reunited with my parents, my family reunited again with our parents and so we... I went to, was going to University of Chicago, I met my husband who was getting a Ph.D. from Purdue University in chemistry and we were introduced by some mutual friends. And we got married about three or four years later, in Chicago in 1950.

AI: And at that time you were, for a while you and your husband lived in the same house with your parents. Is that right? In Chicago.

MY: Yes. My father bought a house in... let's see, when my parents moved to Chicago was 19-, they bought a house... that's right, I wasn't married and I was living with my parents in their apartment on the first floor. They bought this house that had several apartments, had two apartments upstairs, and a basement apartment. And so I was living with my parents on the first floor. My brother Joe was going to high school and Mike was going to a seminary in Evanston, and Tosh was on his way to the University of Washington to go to school there. And we, my parents were really very happy to be together, the family to be together again, because both my parents were such family-oriented people and we, so we lived together for a little period of time and Yosh used to come to visit quite often. And then when we got married, we lived in the basement apartment with -- in my dad's house. And then when I got pregnant with Jeni, my mother thought that the basement was not too healthy for me as a pregnant person, so they evicted -- this is terrible -- they evicted the tenants on the second floor and then we moved into the apartment on the second floor. And then when Mike got married, which was only about a month later, to my sister-in-law Ruth, they evicted the people in the third floor apartment and so that, we became a family, kind of an extended family all living in the same house. My older brother and Joe were still living with my parents and we lived on the first floor -- the second floor apartment.