<Begin Segment 9>

TI: So earlier you mentioned the Cougars, so we talked about kendo, the Boy Scouts. Tell me about the Cougars. What were the Cougars? What was that?

CS: Well, it started off with nine of us, started playing sandlot baseball. And then we started to enter tournaments, and then as we grew, all the younger people came, so we eventually had, like, the Cougar Seniors, Cougar Junior, Cougar Babes, so we had about maybe forty or fifty boys in our club of different ages. So I was in the Cougar Seniors, and then the whole club itself was a big club.

TI: And was this all organized by the boys, or did you have adults who...

CS: We had an adult, Kiyomi Takata was our advisor. So as I say, not only baseball, but we played football and basketball.

TI: And I'm curious, in terms of... did you guys wear special clothes or was there like a special shirt or jackets or anything like that?

CS: Yeah, well, baseball, at first it was nothing, but later on we got uniforms and we started playing with a Cougar uniform.

TI: Or how about just like out in the community? Did you have any, like, jackets that you wore?

CS: Yeah, most of the teams had their own uniforms. It looked nice. (Narr. note: No jackets, just baseball uniform.)

TI: And so out in the community, people could tell whether or not you were a Cougar or not by maybe not only sports, but what you wore sometimes?

CS: Yeah, well, ours had the Cougars written right across there (on our baseball uniform). [Laughs]

TI: And was that pretty common? Were there clubs like this in other parts of the...

CS: Oh, yeah. There was Pasadena and Terminal Island, and they all had teams all over.

TI: And you'd play baseball against each other, football and things.

CS: Yeah.

TI: And how well did the Cougars compete against these other teams in general?

CS: Well, like I showed you there, we won the championship once. [Laughs] So we were pretty good that year. We had, like our pitcher, Jack Tagawa was also a pitcher for the Roosevelt High School team, and the Cougars, two or three of 'em were on the varsity of the Roosevelt High team, so we had a good team.

TI: So we talked about the Cougars and the Boy Scouts and the kendo, which were Japanese Americans. Were you involved in any other organizations or activities with non-Japanese Americans?

CS: Yeah. At Roosevelt High, there was what they called a Manager's Club, about sixty members. And they were the ones that kept all the athletic events going like track meets, they'll hold the tape, or all the menial jobs that has to be done to hold the athletic events. Whether indoor or outdoors, I would say sixty members, we were very busy.

TI: So this was a very diverse group.

CS: Oh, yeah. Four or five Japanese Niseis. In fact, (one year) the head of that group, the student head, was a Nisei later, Yutaka Niisato.

TI: Okay, good.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.