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DM: And how were you treated by the community in Utica?

AM: Well, the Catholic community was very welcoming. They were suspicious of us, but they were welcoming. They were more suspicious of my dad than anybody else. It was because he was fluent in English, he got along fine, and his job was essentially the only male in an all-female orphanage, where all the nuns ran the orphanage, anyone who worked there were females. So my father was the only male, and I think he was sort of the all-around handyman. He kept the boilers running, he kept the maintenance of the buildings, he drove the nuns around as a chauffeur, he took care of all the mechanical things. Now you gotta remember, he's not a mechanical person, so he had to learn all that. And I remember once asking him, I said, "How did you know how to fix that?" He says, "Well, you just figure that you can figure it out." So he just went step by step, apparently, and learn how to do that. Which I thought was, well, he had sort of an innate intelligence that was, belied anything he showed. He was quiet and he was very thoughtful, but he also helped him go through learning how to do things, I guess.

DM: And so your brother then enrolled in high school in Utica?

AM: It was called Utica Free Academy, and he played football. And I remember that it was a good thing for him to do that because he needed that kind of physical involvement in something. It was good for him to do that. But I remember going to the ball games to watch him play, the opponents would say, "Kill the Jap, kill the Jap." And how they knew he was Japanese, I'll never know. 'Cause you've got helmets on, but he would really get beaten up pretty bad. But he stuck it out.

DM: So there was a, it was kind of a mixed welcome then? In some ways, the community was welcoming, and then in other ways not as much.

AM: Yeah. I think that the community of Utica was a mill town, and so they had the Germans in one side of the town, Italians on the other side of the town, and then Hungarians I think it was, or some Slavic group, Poles, maybe. So the town itself was pretty divided; there were ethnic rivalries anyway. So having a Japanese family move in was something that threatening to most of them, because we were Japanese.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.