Densho Digital Archive - Roy H. Matsumoto Interview (denshovh-mroy-01-0020)

<Begin Segment 20>

AI: I think you mentioned that, in an earlier conversation, that you returned to California in about 1929?

RM: Yeah.

AI: So you would have been about sixteen years old, then.

RM: More.

AI: Over sixteen?

RM: Yeah, yeah, eighteen, or something like that.

AI: So, so when, what way your first impressions when you got into Los Angeles and you met your great-uncle again? Did anything look familiar there?

RM: Well, I'm glad to see my uncle, because uncle's nice to me. And that is not the great-uncle, but uncle was nice. And he was still bachelor and then, well, at least, I vaguely now remember that why he didn't marry because I heard from other relative this. My, I don't say my grandmother was mean, but the thing that turned out that way I don't think anybody criticize, in front of me, my grandmother. But they understand what kind of grandmother I had. But she was nice to my brother so therefore she's not mean to everybody. To me, I don't know why, but me and my uncle, maybe, my uncle's a different way, but...

[Interruption]

AI: Okay, so before that break, you were just telling us about your first arriving back into the Los Angeles area. And when you first got back, did you stay with your uncle for a while, a short while?

RM: Well, my great-uncle picked me up so stayed there. But then I visited my uncle right away and was debating whether I gonna stay there or not. But he happened to be, live in the boarding house in Ocean Park and so I thought this not the place to stay. So I decided to stay with my great-uncle, then this happened to be Long Beach, not Los Angeles. He moved to Long Beach area. So the nearest school was at Long Beach so I decided to go there. But first, went to high school, didn't accept me so put 'em in George Washington Junior High School, then get accustomed to, then transferred to. So what I did was I stayed there, oh, less than a year, then all of a sudden a school term come and so they had an agreement, I think, when the first interview, they call me then put me in at sophomore instead of a freshman.