<Begin Segment 19>

BT: Do you want to talk a little bit about your schooling? You were about sixteen years old, seventeen.

FS: Yeah, yeah. I went to school... well, you know when the war broke out, and then January, February, the school situation for us was chaotic at the best. So we didn't know. And then, we were hearing things early that we were going to be sent to camp. So I was taking my lunch and going to school and fooling around. I didn't attend classes. [Laughs] Ditching. Yeah, I was ditching for about a month or two. My folks didn't know, but me and a couple of my other friends, we used to go fool around. We didn't have no money, so we used to go, we couldn't go to a guy's house, so we would go down to the playground and sit around and play the carom, remember the carom game? You use a stick? Played that, and just generally quit, killed time until going home.

BT: And so you didn't go to school after Pearl Harbor?

FS: Oh, no, I went on and off.

BT: And then in Santa Anita, there wasn't...

FS: No school, no school. Because the camp was short-lived.

BT: And then Heart Mountain?

FS: Heart Mountain they had school.

TI: But it sounded like he ditched school, though.

FS: No. In Heart Mountain, I went to school because I met a lady from Santa Clara. She was about three years older than me, and she was teaching typing class. She was good-looking. [Laughs] I made out with her. I flunked class so I could stay second (term). I flunked class purposely.

TI: Frank, you were a bad boy.

FS: I wouldn't think so. And she told me one day, she said, "Frank," she said, "I like you, but you're too young for me.

BT: She'd get in trouble. So did you ever graduate from high school?

FS: No, never did. No time to go to school. Well, at Tule Lake they had school, but they were telling me that it's not worth going because there's nothing worthwhile studying.

BT: Well, I guess in Tule Lake, by the time you were there, there were only the Japanese schools.

FS: They had English school. They had Newell High School. They had it. And I started to go there, then I found out that I have to go two years or three years to get diploma. Then I found out, in my life, I started counting my age and everything. You know, I said, "Frank, you must have been pretty stupid. Because you're going to be nineteen by this calculation to finish high school." And you're supposed to get out of high school at seventeen years old. I said, "Where did you mess up?" So I quit. I didn't go. I was too embarrassed.

TI: So you decided, because you got so far behind, you'll just drop out rather than go forward.

FS: Yeah. And people told me that they didn't learn nothing anyway. It's a waste of time.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.