<Begin Segment 9>

PM: So tell me about your, your attempt to enlist. Tell me about how you enlisted. You went to the recruitment office?

LK: Huh?

PM: You went to the recruitment office to join the army?

LK: Yeah.

PM: And what did they say?

LK: When I joined the army?

PM: Yes.

LK: Well, you know, actually, when I joined the army, everybody said I'm too short, too short. And I never think about it. Even the captain didn't think about it. He said, "You know, Larry, I'm not going to send you home." And now I just got a Christmas card from my colonel. He said, "You know, I was gonna send you home from camp." See, he was a lieutenant then. Bert Nishimura. And, oh, he's the guy that wrote me that, "You know, my officer in Honolulu's Schofield Barracks found out that you was too short." I don't know how come anybody found out that I'm too short. Nobody knows that. I mean, nobody knows besides the captain. And when he told me that, he said, "You know, if I was... I'd send you home." And then, then yesterday I got a Christmas card, he said, "You know, lucky I didn't send you home." He said, "All my friends said, 'You know, I didn't know Larry was so short.'" [Laughs] I said, I knew that I'm so short. "Well," he said, "that's what everybody said." So he said, "I'm glad that I didn't send you home." So...

PM: So what did the army, army has you listed at what height?

LK: Huh?

PM: Army has you listed at what height?

LK: Five-feet-eight.

PM: And what --

LK: See, that's why I got in the service. Otherwise, I couldn't get in there. Even at five feet I couldn't get in there. And that's what my original record shows, that I'm five feet.

PM: How tall are you? How tall did you think --

LK: Four feet nine-and-a-half. [Laughs] Right now, I'm four feet nine-and-a-half. But my shoes got bigger.

PM: What size are your shoes, by the way?

LK: Now, I got size five.

PM: What size were they when you were in the service?

LK: See, what happened is -- yeah, size five now. But I wear two socks.

PM: When you were in the service, what size were your shoes?

LK: Size eight.

PM: That's the size that they give you, size boot they give you.

LK: That's the size they gave me during the... now, my pants was up to my head. My sleeve was to the floor. That's how long my sleeve was, to the floor. So what I do, you know, I tuck this, tuck it in. And now, when we first went in the service, they called that leggings. That you wrap around. So that's why nobody knows that I had long pants, because I tuck it in.

PM: So Larry, what size were your feet back in the service?

LK: Huh?

PM: What size were your actual feet back in the service, when you were in the military?

LK: My feet?

PM: Yes.

LK: That's always, two-and-a-half triple E. That's my original size when I went in the service.

PM: But you had to wear size eight boots.

LK: So, and then I used to use size eight, and talk about newspapers, I'd stuff 'em, put 'em in there. You know how space is when you get an eight, size eight. [Laughs]

MA: Larry, how did you actually, why was your height listed as 5'8"? How did you actually get past that?

LK: What happened is my record got burned. All my record got burned. You know Kashino, and my record, letter K, all burned. I mean, completely burned. So my record is all gone now. I don't have no record.

MA: So, but when you went down to the recruitment office, why did they write down your height as 5'8" in the first place?

LK: That's what I'd like to know why. You know what -- oh, we found that out. We got a micro-, yeah, microscope, and look in that thing, and the burned record, and that's how we find out it's a eight instead of a three. We look at all the threes, and we look at the eight, and zero, and my original record is 0, not eight. But how the heck it came out eight, that's what we found out, and that's why the Stars and Stripes said I can't enter this picture in the Stars and Stripes, "because you're not that short." That is three days after I went in the service, now. How can that be? They didn't have no record back, say I was that short, I don't know. Anyway -- [laughs] -- it came out that way. And I said, so the reporter from Stars and Stripes said, "Sorry, no picture." And you know what? We found that picture in sixty years, San Francisco presidio. That's where the army personnel record is. And then my friend Lyn Crost found that out in -- that's right, you know your article and the picture, that nice, not the big one but the small one? How come... I asked Kubota, he's a photographer like you. Anyway, he asked, I asked him, "Why can't you take a picture like that?" How did you get a small picture like that? From the camera? Camera or computer?

PM: Computer.

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