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MA: So let's talk a little bit about your childhood, I guess, growing up in Fife. What are some of your early childhood memories?

GM: Well, I grew up a pretty good life in Fife, because I was the youngest in the family, and I had more of a free reign of what I can do. And going to school was always a chore for me, like any other kid in school. You know, we didn't like school, and I had to go to Japanese school after school. And being the type of kid I was, I got kicked out in the third grade in Japanese school.

MA: What happened?

GM: Well, a friend of mine told me he would change the clock ahead if I would do it. And so I said, "Okay," and he changed the clock ahead one hour, and then he said, "Okay, it's your turn," and I changed it ahead one hour. And what happened was that the teacher come in and looked at the clock and said, "Who did it?" And as a child, or a young kid, I didn't think anybody squealed, and kids never squealed to teachers who, about who did something. And we all kept quiet until the teacher said, "Well, you don't get to go home tonight unless you tell me who did it." And one of the older kids finally gave up and he said, "George did it," and so they kicked me out of school.

MA: Were your parents angry?

GM: No, they weren't angry. I told, my mother asked me if I did it, and I said, "No," and she said, "Do you want to go back to school?" And I says, "No." And that was it. [Laughs] I never went back to Japanese school after that, and I was kind of happy about it, which left me a lot more time to play.

MA: What were some of the activities you did when you played around?

GM: Well, I loved to fish a lot, and fool around in the country there, but fishing was my, from a very young age. And since I wasn't a farmer's son or living on a farm, I didn't have to do any farm work after school. So there were some things like delivering the newspaper with my neighbor kids all over Fife. And I used to know every family in the whole area from Tacoma to Puyallup, practically, because of the newspaper routes we used to run on. But my childhood was pretty exciting, and by thirteen, I was shooting a shotgun and .22 rifles, and fishing a lot, hiking, camping, and having a, basically, a nice, good, fun, fun time. But that wasn't all by myself, you know, I would do it with my neighbors with kids and stuff like that.

MA: So your group of friends was kind of the neighborhood kids?

GM: Yeah.

MA: What was the, I guess, what was the ethnic makeup of your group of friends?

GM: Okay, I had a Indian family next, next door, and an Eskimo family next door. In Fife, until the war, there was no Chinese or black. There were Indians, a lot of Scandinavians, Swiss, Italians and German families. It was a nice area because we all grew up together from first grade on up. And most of the Japanese kids, until they went to school, talked Japanese because that's all they're accustomed to on the farm. But I was more exposed to the regular people around there, the Eskimos and Indians, we all spoke English. So I knew very little Japanese as far as speaking fluently.

MA: So it sounds like, then, it was a pretty friendly community, even though there are different ethnicities and different people?

GM: Well, Fife was quite an area for Japanese because the, as far as the school was concerned, our percentage of Japanese in the school was thirty percent, and that's a pretty good majority there as far as the type of nationalities were concerned. And the discrimination was not like being in a community of all Japanese or something like that.

MA: What do you mean? How was it different?

GM: Well, we didn't look at ourselves towards being Japanese so much as being away from the... you know what I mean, since we're assimilated already, it was easier to get along.

MA: So you had more, kind of, I guess, exposure to different people?

GM: Yeah, all types, except for the Chinese and blacks, they weren't around, so I, I really didn't know what they were like, because I never had experienced that, since I didn't get out of Fife that often. Like in Seattle, your neighbor could be Chinese or even a few blacks at the time. But there was no discrimination as far as I was concerned.

MA: So it sounds like you had a pretty unique experience.

GM: I think everybody in Fife did, yeah, uh-huh. But the schools treated us nice, and most of the more intelligent kids were up in the upper half. I don't know where I was. [Laughs] I was down there on the, on the line, I think.

MA: So I'm curious about your group of friends. Did you ever go over to your friends' houses and interact with their parents, of, you know, your Indian friends?

GM: Well, yeah, as I grew up, it was nothing to walk into somebody else's house. My neighbor was Indian, we used to go over there and play, although they didn't have kids my age, they were a little older, but they, my other neighbor was Eskimo and Manuel Mello, the boy that was my age, we palled around very much during our younger days. We hunted together and I helped him milk his cow and feed his chicken and go into his house and lay on his bear rug and play around the house, you know. But there was probably... one thing different about us that -- our parents really was pretty strict about how you act as a Japanese. "When you go there, make sure you don't walk in the house with dirty shoes," and stuff like that, and, "don't cuss," and things like that. So other than that, we did, did everything like any other kid.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.