<Begin Segment 21>

TI: So let's keep talking about, as you're growing up, going to, like junior high school, where did you go to junior high school?

EBA: Went to Washington Junior High, the original old wooden building of Washington Junior High. And by then we had made this transition from, we had some distance from the war years so it was an easier time to be there other than the angst of going to junior high. [Laughs] And again, my friends from Bailey Gatzert, we continued on to junior high and transitioned from there to Garfield High School, just continued that whole relationship. It was a time of secure, feeling secure in that relationship. We weren't being moved from here to there and so forth.

TI: So in terms of your friends in junior high school and high school, did you retain many of the friends that you had at a very young age, like Japanese Americans and, or... talk about that a little bit, about who your friends were.

EBA: Yeah, I had friends from Bailey Gatzert all the way up through junior high and high school at Garfield. Most of them were friends that attended Japanese Baptist Church, so we had this real tight-knit group of oh, there must've been six or eight of us that we played basketball together, were on teams together, we went hiking together all the time, Mt. Rainier in the summertime. And there was this, this real secure feeling of friendship and we never thought about each other being any difference in ethnicity or color or anything like that at all.

TI: How about being the son of the pastor at Japanese Baptist Church? Was there any additional pressure or anything because of that on you?

EBA: Well, there's always pressure for any child that's a preacher's kid, PKs, we call them, so there's always a sense, maybe a deeper, greater sense of behavior, decorum, especially being in the Japanese community, more so than being in a, maybe just a Caucasian community. And so it was a time of, you know, I was always the good son and so it was, I would hear comments. I'd, you know, well, "You shouldn't talk like that," or, "You shouldn't do that because your father's a minister," just, probably more typical stuff that any PK feels. But I think, to me there was a greater sense of, of decorum and maybe being careful not to dishonor my father because he was a huge figure in the Japanese community, not just the Japanese Baptist Church, but to the whole Japanese community.

TI: So how was that? I mean, the reason that I say that is I'm a parent. I have two teenagers and...

EBA: Yeah.

TI: And you know, in the high school, they're both in high school, and there's definitely a sense at that age where I see them wanting to really become their own person, and in some cases even rebelling around sort of the things that parents and the community want them to be. How was this for you during this period?

EBA: Well, I was very careful to be the good son. And thinking back, people have said, "Well, what, did you ever do anything bad or wrong or something like that?" And the only thing that I can really come up with is that I remember one time -- we loved, I loved to play with my friends in the church building itself. It was a great place to play, just hide-and-seek up and down the hallways and closets and classrooms and the dumbwaiter, even that went from the top floor down to the kitchen and the gymnasium. But one night we were up there playing and I got on the phone and I called a Chinese restaurant, I think it was Ruby Chow's at the time. And I ordered this Jap-, or Chinese meal, Chinese dinner. And then they would call a cab and they'd have the cab deliver the meal to the house. Well, I, so I called Ruby Chow's and ordered this Chinese meal and, of course, they asked for the address. They didn't ask for the phone number, they just asked for an address so I gave them, I just picked an address in the community out of the phone book and said this is the address. You know, nowadays the owners are more aware of things like that, but that's the, about the worst thing that I can remember in my childhood.

TI: So were you caught? I mean...

EBA: No, it wasn't caught, No, never caught. So I sneaked through that without any judgment, but I think back on it and think oh, man, that was a dumb thing to do, but just kid stuff. [Laughs]

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.