<Begin Segment 18>

AI: Well, so, when you started at University of Washington, what, were you still living at home then while you were going to college?

RS: Yes, yes. Driving, commuting to school every day.

AI: And were you also, did you have a job or other kinds of activities?

RS: No, because during the summers when I was in high school and in college, I worked as a Japanese gardener. And a fellow named Bill Yorozu was good friends with my family. My dad asked him if he would hire me, because the wages as a Japanese gardener were two dollars an hour, I mean, they were fabulous at that time, and so I felt really honored. Previous to that I did what most JA, young JA junior high school kids were doing. I was working on the farms. I started out by picking beans and then picking strawberries and for two or three years I worked for Shigeru Kiba and his wife Miyo. They had a farm on Beacon Hill. And we'd, during the summers get up early in the morning and go pick berries all day and did that all summer. And so getting a job as a gardener was like godsend because the money was so much better, maybe two dollars an hour was maybe twice as much as what I was making picking berries. And so, when Bill Yorozu hired me I was just knocked over. So from that point on, in the summers, I worked for Bill six days a week, alternating, I would cut grass and other times install gardens. And one summer worked for Kubota Gardens, when it was a nursery, and sort of pulled weeds. I said, every day I pulled weeds to keep that nursery clean.

And then two summers I worked at the Arboretum putting in the Japanese garden there. And those were amazing memories because I remember they brought in this old, eighty-something-year-old man from Japan to direct the installation of the garden. And he would be there every morning when we showed up for work with his beret, dark glasses, folding stool and a pointer stick. And we all despised that pointer stick because he would make life so miserable for us telling us what to do with that stick and pointing, because we spent weeks putting in the waterfall at that garden. And we would spend a whole day moving just one rock. And these rocks were covered with moss and we had to chain them up in a certain way without damaging the moss. And with these big cranes we'd lift one boulder up. And it became a real art to chain them up in a certain way to get the boulder to rotate. And he'd be down there screaming at us with this stick, telling us, rotate this way. And he'd be speaking in Japanese so we couldn't understand him. And then we'd dig out this big hole and place this rock and then take the chains off and pull the chain out. And from his vantage point down below he'd look to see what we did. And he may, walk in this bit semicircle, and then he'd scream to us in Japanese, this, which meant re-chain it, lift it up, and then he'd go, make some movement like this, shift it this way. And we'd have to chain it up all over, and oh, it was just a nightmare. And I also remember putting in all the rocks in the pond, those round rocks that are in there, and hand-laying all those in the concrete. So for two years I worked on that installation of that garden. So, even, I'd say, every other summer I'd go down there during the summertime just to look to see how it's matured and it brings back all those memories.

But, yeah, so that's what I did in the summers. And then as I said, the other times we took care of the grass and, at places that at the time we couldn't live. Laurelhurst, for example, was white-only. So the only Asian people you'd see there were gardeners because it was prestigious to have a Japanese gardener, not just any gardener, but when I say "Japanese gardener" there's a particular, that was the best, and so we represented the best. But one thing that was very painful for me, I remember, was a lot of the kids that went to Broadmoor, went to Garfield. And the cut-off point was Madison Avenue. And if you lived south of Madison Avenue you can go to Garfield. If you lived north, which Broadmoor was, you had to go to another school. A lot of these kids from Broadmoor, because they were so well-connected, used to falsify their addresses so they can go to Garfield. And why would rich white kids want to go to Garfield? It was because, number one, very few of the kids at Garfield were interested in student governance. Number two, they excelled in sports. And so, if these kids would go to Garfield, they could be student body president, class president, and all this kind of stuff and they could accept all the sports trophies. Furthermore, Garfield as a whole wasn't known for its academics prowess. So these kids, by just cracking a few books could win all of the scholarships to college. So as a result, funny thing about Garfield High School was that if you looked at all the student body presidents that they were all white and a lot of them lived in Broadmoor. And they were the ones that you would see in the paper accepting the all-sports trophy and all that kind of stuff. Well, what I was leading to was that one of the persons that was a cheerleader, and was also senior class president, lived in Broadmoor. And we took care of her house. And I remember how painful it was on Saturdays when we used to cut their grass for us to go over there, and I was operating the power mower. And we'd go there in the swimming pool and there would be like as many as six of my classmates sitting around the pool there. And the sort of ribbing and kidding and, you know, as I said earlier, this was not a favorite time of mine, in life. And it was exacerbated by episodes like this. And I would have to cut this grass and they'd be kidding me and cutting around the swimming pool where they were all sort of luxuriating and all that, in a neighborhood that I could never live in and that I was only allowed in to, to take care of, to maintain. So I recently did a painting about that. So that was sort of, I think, typical of some of the experiences that, of that time of life.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.