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TI: Okay, so I'm going to start the interview with today's date. Today is Thursday, September 24, 2009, and we're in Los Angeles in the offices of Tex Nakamura. And doing the interview is Barbara Takei and me, Tom Ikeda, and on camera we have Dana Hoshide. And so thank you for being here with us today. The first question, Tex, is can you tell me when you were born?

TN: I was born July 16, 1917, in San Francisco.

TI: And so that would make you today ninety-two years old?

TN: Ninety-two, yeah.

TI: Well, you're in great shape. And you said you were born in Sacramento?

TN: San Francisco.

TI: San Francisco. And for the purposes of this interview, we're going to kind of jump around a little bit. But I guess the first question, I just want to ask, how did you get the nickname "Tex"?

TN: Oh, I received the nickname because I was playing in the Sacramento High School B basketball team, and I was the only Japanese American there, and the rest of them were all white people and colored people. And they can't pronounce my name fully, "Tetsujiro," so my coach put up the name "Tex" for me as an abbreviation. [Laughs] It stuck with me all my life.

TI: And so from that point on, people just called you "Tex" instead of "Tetsujiro"?

TN: No, I'd never been to Texas until during the war time I went there one time.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.