<Begin Segment 9>

MA: Can you tell me a little bit about your experience in high school? What was the name of your high school?

MT: Lewis & Clark High School.

MA: And what was, I guess, the ethnic makeup of the school?

MT: Well, it was rather... it was wide in the fact that there was wealthy people, and then there were the not-wealthy people. And then the Japanese people was just a sliver in there, but we never, I don't recall in my group or anything, us mixing with the hakujins. We stayed, stayed with Nihonjins and we didn't go dancing with them and this and that, at least what I saw.

MA: So in your group of friends, you, they were all Japanese?

MT: Uh-huh. But I had American friends, too, but, and I joined the Ti Girls, that's a cheer thing and stuff like that, and had friends in there, but they weren't Nihonjins, they were all hakujin. Very little bit of Nihonjin if you put it as a thing, whole thing.

MA: How did that feel for you? I mean, going to high school with so many, just, the Niseis were only such a little part of the population there?

MT: I didn't feel anything, no, I didn't. I don't... it was okay. I do, I do remember when war broke out, that I heard that some of the teachers were a little bit sharp with the Nihonjin kids, you know, made 'em cry and stuff. [Laughs] Yeah.

MA: Did the, so the Nisei seemed to fit in with the rest of the school in a sense?

MT: Yeah, I think they didn't know us well enough to feel that they could, how you do when you're, you can... they didn't, I don't think they pushed us around and stuff, no. I really don't. And I don't remember discrimination as such, like during the war when we went out with a carload of Nihonjin kids and we... this is what happened one time. We went and there was a restaurant named Nim's Cafe, and they said, "Let's go," somebody said, "let's go in there." Somebody else says, "No, no, they won't let you in." I said, "Oh, sure," and somebody says, "They'll let us in." "Okay, well then, you guys go in and see, we'll come in after you." They got kicked out. "No Japs allowed here," they got kicked out. I was with the group when we walked in there and we got kicked out. [Laughs]

MA: Did someone who worked there come up to you and say, "Get out"?

MT: Yeah. They didn't want us around. Yeah. So I remember that real well, I mean, I'll never forget that. And then others who, you know, they say things as they walk by you. But you just ignore 'em.

MA: When you were in high school, what, I guess, what were your sort of dreams for the future? Did you have any hopes and dreams in terms of like a job or...

MT: Yeah. Well, I -- this is gonna kill you -- but I took straight commercial class, and I hate numbers. [Laughs] But I figured that if I could be a secretary or something, but really I would rather go to college and learn agriculture type of thing. And that went to pot, too, because the war just broke, and 1941 I graduated. So the war broke out in 1941. Came home from church, on the radio they were saying that Pearl Harbor got bombed, yeah. So that was out, too. No college or... I did try going to Spokane Junior High, but it folded. But that's okay. I was busy raising kids anyway.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.