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TI: Well, let's talk about your friends. So who were some of your best friends growing up?

FS: Well, well, I had this one, one, there were a couple Japanese American families over at the railroad camp, and I had one particular friend there, Japanese American kid named Sasai, Frank Sasai. And he was, he was a friend, pretty good friend, at least during high school. But I had, I had a whole lot of friends nearby, and some of 'em were, they were just Caucasians. They lived nearby, and we would see each other every day, play together, go down to the ballfield and get together. We weren't, we weren't a gang, but we, I don't think there were gangs in those days, but we would hang together and would, would protect each other. And so they were, they were... an Italian family there and what was his... okay, one was a Scandinavian family, we were really good friends. I was at his house almost every day. Let's see... they, they were all close by, within a couple of blocks of the laundry.

TI: Now, when you'd go to one of your friend's homes, the Scandinavian, how did that seem? Was it different than what your home was like?

FS: Well, yeah, they actually lived in a house. Our home was in a flat above the laundry, and so they, they had a home and they had a yard to play in, so that was different. And he had a vacant lot next to him so we could play football and baseball on his vacant lot. But that was kind of a gathering place there. We, we would go there and play and all day. Of course, the thing that the discipline does is that at six o'clock you knew enough to go home. You didn't, you didn't just, something you just didn't violate. You only miss that once and it gets, you'd really catch heck. So we were, we were really, I think, again, disciplined. You knew that you were in trouble if you didn't get home.

TI: Because you had to get home for, for dinner.

FS: For dinner, yes, right.

TI: And be there. So when you were with your friends, just sort of hanging out, what kind of activities, do you remember games or anything like that?

FS: Oh, yeah, we would play football and we would play baseball, softball, baseball. In the summertime, we'd go down to the, to the municipal pool and swim. We all had bicycles, the hill, the hills, there's a little line of hills behind Hillyard, and we'd go hiking up there. But we were outdoors a lot. We could, we would range forever and parents never worried about us getting into trouble.

TI: But when you have a group of boys, were there times where you did get in trouble and your parents had to reprimand you for what you guys did? Or do you guys... how was that?

FS: I don't, remember ever really, ever really getting, well, nobody told on us, I guess. You know how that goes. We, we did have some kind of a code of not telling on each other, I suspect. But it was, it, we, we got along well together and we would protect each other. I can remember this one big Swede kid, he would, he would look after us if we got into trouble. It, but then we would, we would associate with other friends, friends, so that friends had friends. It was, it, there was just a sense -- there was a sense of community out in Hillyard, we were isolated from downtown Spokane, the only way to get down there is to ride the bus or to have your family, your family wasn't going to drive you down there, so you just didn't do it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.