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AI: Well, before we get into the summer session at Stanford, I wanted to go back a little ways. And you had mentioned how Frank Okada had introduced you really to the circle of Japanese American artists here in the Northwest. And I wanted to ask you if you would say a little bit more about that and, for people who don't know, of course, Frank is a Nisei generation. His parents were Issei immigrants. And so, and so he was older than you, and in some ways the generation of your parents although not quite as old. So maybe if you could say a little bit more about those men that you came in contact with and...

RS: Yeah, I can't really say... there is one story that I didn't tell that actually is not, we're rewinding way back now, but when we got out of camp and moved to 946 Twenty-fourth South, right across the street is where Paul Horiuchi lived. Directly across the street. And he had three boys, John, Paul and Vincent who became my best friends. John, the middle son and I were the same age, so we were the closest. So Paul was always the older one and Vincent was always the younger one and as just sort of a side note, when Bea and I got married, Paul sang at our wedding. But I remember, at that time, because I spent so much time over at their house, Paul was, had a body fender shop. And, but he painted during the nighttime and of course during the weekends. And I remember going over there and he would use his sofa as an easel. And of course he wasn't painting, he was collaging, so it wasn't like he was getting paint over everything, he had all these different kinds of papers and stuff. And I remember always watching him and not really comprehending what this activity was and how unusual it was, as to what he was doing. You know, but he was very friendly and he was very approachable and he'd talk about it and so on. But this was always sort of the backdrop to me playing around and having this sort of childhood with his three boys. And I remember Bernadette, and cooking lunch and so on.

But I also remember them being Catholic, which soon had meaning to me because I remember how every week John would show me a list of the movies that they couldn't see. And these were all the movies I wanted to see. And I couldn't understand, "Why can't you see these movies?" And, and of course they belonged to the Catholic church, Maryknoll, and I remember John asking me if I wanted to join the Cub Scouts and I just sort of said, "Yeah." I mean, I just saw they were having a good time, all three brothers were in the Cub Scouts and so I didn't say anything to my parents. And I went to a meeting that was at their church, again, not really thinking about the politics of religion. And we were going to be fitted for, it was Cub Scouts, for Cub Scout uniforms, but we had to sell tickets to the Maryknoll bazaar. And I came home with a fist full of these tickets and I went to my dad and said, "Hey, do you want to buy tickets to the Maryknoll bazaar?" And he went ballistic. He said, "What are you doing selling tickets to the Maryknoll bazaar?" And I said, "Well, because I'm joining the Cub Scouts." And he said, "No you're not." And this sort of territorial, "You're a Methodist, and eventually, watch out, they're gonna recruit you or they're gonna want you to become Catholic," and so on. And I had no idea what this was all about. All I knew was that I had to return the tickets to, to John and say, "Hey I can't sell these, I can't go to that." And never making any kind of connection to the list of movies he couldn't see and all of this kind of stuff except that my dad sort of outlined the community. That these people were Catholics and you were not, and all of a sudden that was introduced into my life. But I do have these early sort of recollections of Paul and working at his body fender shop and then eventually they moved out of the neighborhood.

But if I could tell one other story about Paul. Because it's sort of at the end of his life. And this is when, this is at Keiro, nursing home. My father was in his last week of life and my sister was up from San Diego and I was up from Kansas and we were spending... and my mom, who happened to be at Nikkei Manor at the time, but we were spending every hour of the day at Keiro. And one evening, after dinner was over, I had this sketchbook with me and I was working on this new performance piece that I was writing and, they were ideal times for me just to sit there and work on this performance. And I went into the dining area and Paul was in there. He had been in there for, I don't know, over a year, two years maybe. And he was at the last sort of stages himself of Alzheimer's. And that's what my father had. And I sat down at the big round table and I just, because I knew that Paul couldn't communicate, but I just sat there with him, and I was working in my sketchbook. And I'd look up every once in a while and I saw Paul sitting there and his eyes were directed over at my sketchbook, and he just kept looking at it like this. And pretty soon I had the idea of seeing if he would respond to this and I pushed the sketchbook over to him and put the pen in his hands. And he grabbed the pen and he looked at these two blank pages of the sketchbook and he ran the pen up and down the spine of the book several times, like this. And I just sat there and watched him do that, and he finally stopped. And then he started to make some scratch marks on one side of the paper. And I just sort of watching him do that and I recognized that he was going over and over the same thing. And finally he just, he got tired and he put the pen down and just sort of sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and I knew he had sort of checked out at that point. So I reached over and I pulled the sketchbook and I looked at it. And I couldn't figure out what it was except that he kept repeating the same marks and it looked like some, at first I thought he was writing something in Japanese. But it turned out what he was writing was P.H. His initials. Just like the way he initialed his paintings, a lot of them, just P.H. And I thought that was such a remarkable sort of moment that, you know, in the, I mean, his mind was virtually gone, that he was able to make this connection between the sketchbook and art and his initials. And so that was sort of my kind of departing moments with Paul. So it was kind of interesting. My closest moments to him were at the very beginning watching him put these collages together on his sofa and then his entire career I never saw him. And then just before he checked out, in Keiro Nursing Home. So...

AI: Thanks. That is, that's a really strong image.

RS: Yeah. So where are we?

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.