<Begin Segment 11>

TI: Okay, so Ed, so we're now on the second tape, and I'm going to bring us back to Seattle, you're now, you returned from Japan, you're now going to school at Broadway High School. And you mentioned how you, although Japanese when you came was your primary language, you had enough English that you understood things, and you actually became an honors student at Broadway High School. But I just wanted to get a sense of what, what type of subjects did you enjoy at Broadway High School?

ET: Actually, I enjoyed everything. Really didn't matter, so I kind of left it up to the counselor in those days. We didn't have a counselor, but then my favorite teacher that I could talk to, and they definitely found I should be taking a lot of art. So there was a teacher that taught both my cousin George and Keith Oka, and her name is Miss Jones, I can't remember her first name, but Miss Jones. So we were kind of known through the years, maybe there was about ten or twelve years apart. But we were all "Jones Boys," and there were several others, too. And the teacher said, "Well, you are definitely one of 'Jones Boys.'"

TI: Well, how did Miss Jones teach art? What, what did she do?

ET: Well, she didn't, she was not a painter or anything like that, but she had a, kind of a nice feeling about the work that we do, and kind of encouraging way that she would be doing this more. And I think she became one of the top teachers of our whole time at Broadway. And the "Jones Boys" is pretty well-known, too.

TI: Who were some of the other "Jones Boys" besides George...

ET: Well, I think George and Keith, and gosh, I don't know. There were quite a number of them. Of course, not restricted to Japanese, either. There were a number of Caucasian students that belonged in "Jones Boys," too. But George was looked upon as probably the best, and so, Keith was saying that if it wasn't for George, probably would have never had this "Jones Boys" thing. But I also, of course, thought that Keith was in it, and certainly he was a completely different type of artist. We used to submit stuff to Volunteer Park museum for annual, and were accepted. And I was rejected once, after winning prize, and I got rejected because one of the teachers... he was actually associate dean of art class, his name was Ambrois Patterson, and married a student in the same class he was in. And I never really thought, I didn't respect too many people in those days, and that's, that's probably one of my downfalls, because I wasn't obedient enough to follow some of those things that teacher was telling me. I always thought, "You just don't have enough talent, and why are you teaching me?" and that type of attitude. And he's the one that rejected me, so I just quit the school right there. [Laughs]

TI: Quit which school?

ET: University of Washington.

TI: Oh, okay, your art school. Okay, got it.

ET: That's just a little short, because I had to quit anyway because of war. One of the reasons quit is because they were firing all the anti-American politics in those days, so there were communists and socialists and people like that. And among teachers, that's pretty common those days. And we had a Mexican lithographer, Emilio Amera, I think that was his name. And after the war, Keith and I both went over to call on him because he was washing dishes at the Olympic Hotel. And when I saw him, he just kind of was so happy to see me, at the same time he was very sad that he's doing what he's doing.

TI: So was it almost like they were, he was, like, blacklisted in terms of...

ET: Yeah, blacklisted and got fired from teaching because of the fact that I think most Mexican teachers came from that kind of socialism, communism type of thing. I wasn't. I didn't think we can, every, well, because I always realized America is so much more socialism than Japan was. So I didn't need to be any more than that. I think we always followed after that. We will certainly follow. There is nothing you could do, we're too small, and we will just use Japanese philosophy that Matsushita Konosuke wrote. He is head of Panasonic and seventeen other electronics company, and he wrote the, kind of a book, and it was my friend that was, edited that book. And it's called the Yasashi Kokoro, it means "very obedient mind," you know, "obedient heart," or something like that. And it was a very good book, and that's what I had after so many things gone through during the wartime, because it was, it came out in about 1960, that book did. But then by then I was a great friend of Mike Masaoka, and Masao Sato and those people, the JACL, and I pushed the JACL as a group of Japanese Americans who actually...

TI: And you got to know these gentlemen after the war?

ET: Uh-huh, yeah.

TI: So we'll, we'll get to that a little bit later.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.