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TI: Okay, so, so Dick, we're now into the second hour, and you had just finished talking about how one of the ways you'd get out of Japanese language school is you got to do one sport a year, and that was football. And so let's, let's talk a little bit about, about your school life. So you're playing football for your school team? Which, which high school did you go to?

RY: I went to Lewis & Clark, that's, Lewis & Clark was mostly Japanese in there, too, but that was the closest. And I went to Lewis & Clark for four years and played...

TI: Besides, besides football, what other activities did you like doing at Lewis & Clark?

RY: Well, like I said, my mother told me only one sport for after school sports, so I just chose football. Excuse me, I tried baseball, but, when baseball season came around, I had a mitt that somebody gave me when I was small, and I went out and tried it, but my eyes weren't that good, so I, when I went, I was out in the field and somebody hit, hit a fly ball right to me, and the way I caught was caught it in my arms. So I said, "Oh, baseball is not for me." [Laughs] So no, that's, that's all I played, is I tried to play football. And I enjoyed it whether I made a letter or not. In those days, you had to make, you had to be, play varsity at least three or four quarters in the varsity. But I guess I was never too good, I was too good for the second team and I was not too good on the first team. But I enjoyed myself playing football with the other students, too.

TI: So what, what position did you play in football?

RY: Oh, I played guard, 'cause I couldn't see the, I guess, I guess that's the reason why I couldn't play backfield, because I couldn't coordinate myself with the football. So yeah, I played right guard. I was having fun.

TI: And do you remember like in, in school, what subjects you liked the most?

RY: Oh, I didn't have any special subjects. I liked math, in a way I liked math, 'cause I was doing better in math. But then during my senior year, I was going to take trigonometry, and that senior year, they were gonna move the machine shop to the trade school and I wanted to take machine shop, so I took, I took machine shop instead of, it had to be in the afternoon at the trade school. So when trigonometry went down the drain, I was, I thought I was pretty smart because we had two or three, I had, I had three Japanese students in there. And I was kind of outsmarting them, I thought, but I says, "Well, I've got to take trade school." [Laughs] So I went to trade school and took machine shop. So, but no, I wasn't very good at English, so that's one thing that at the university, well, college, I guess, Whitworth College in those days, I took pre-med. A very interesting course, but I wasn't, I wasn't built for college. But...

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.