<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Something we haven't touched on yet is your, your schooling before the war. Can you describe where you went to, to elementary school?

YN: Very, it's very significant, because it, from (attending Pacific) school that was physically across the street from the grocery store, (changed) and made it into a different type of school, causing me to have to leave that school. As a child, that was very traumatic, but in one essence it was exciting, because the school I was transferred was way out of my realm of my neighborhood, it was called Summit school.

TI: So let me, let me sort of summarize here. So there was a school right across the street from the store, and that was the Pacific School.

YN: Pacific elementary school.

TI: And it started off as a regular elementary school, but while you were going, it switched to the --

YN: It switched to a, what we call a school for handicapped and for, amazingly, for those would have been English as a Second Language or vice-versa.

TI: Interesting. So you were then transferred to the Summit school, which is, oh, I'm thinking -- my kids actually go to that building right now -- so it's probably about half a mile or so.

YN: Absolutely.

TI: And actually in the direction away from the community.

YN: Right.

TI: And so why, why'd you go to Summit rather than Bailey Gatzert?

YN: 'Cause that was even further in the eyes -- and that, I wasn't in the right district. So, you see, I was in suburbia. So, but they don't have the sophistication. There's no bus, no bus runs from there; I walked. That walking was another adventure of what made me what I was.

TI: That's interesting; you had to walk up... so up by, like, First Baptist? Past First Baptist?

YN: Up there, all the way up the hill.

TI: All the way up to Summit.

YN: Steep hills, into strange territory. And then I found that school also had the school for those of hard of hearing, the children. So it was a completely -- as a child, my mother and father never once took me to school. They had to work.

TI: Did they ever go to -- do they, did they have, like, open houses for parents?

YN: They never could come.

TI: So your teachers never, ever met your parents?

YN: [Shakes head] But they knew of them, because we had a grocery store, but not in the sense of today.

TI: So, so tell me a little bit about Summit, and what was it like? You said it was, it's exciting, different.

YN: It was more interesting for a child, because it had no playfield. It had no playground, so I had to learn another thing that they did, they played one-wall handball. That was your recess for the day. It was on a hill, and no playground. And from there, I went to internment, so I had in a short period of time, three traumatic elementary school moves, none ordained by my want, but by history.

TI: So you went from Pacific to Summit and then to the camps?

YN: To the camp, to Huntsville Elementary School in the fourth grade.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.