<Begin Segment 20>

TI: Okay, so let's go back to you. So you're still in high school at this point.

ST: Yes. I was a junior, I would be entering the junior year that fall. So we, my sister was lucky enough to be able to get us housing at the Seattle housing, and it was called University (Homes). And it was a very large project.

TI: Oh, so at some point you moved to Seattle.

ST: That was -- oh, no. That was after we got married. I didn't moved to Seattle until after I was married.

TI: Oh, so I'm sorry, University (Homes) in Portland.

ST: Yeah.

TI: Oh, okay. When you said...

ST: It was a housing project. It was in the north end of town, it was near, not, it was near Vanport, I don't know if you've heard of Vanport. That was the big city they built for all the steel workers and everybody who came to work in the boat building industry in Portland, because there was no housing. So the government built these buildings. It was largely for the big influx of workers, wartime workers. And Vanport got flooded, and many people died in that. But we weren't living there, we were living up the hill a little, you might say, in University (Homes). And we were fortunate to get that, that we didn't have to live somewhere else. But the high school we went to, that I went to was called Roosevelt, and it was the northernest part of Portland. It was called, it had been an area that was called St. John's, it had been a separate city, and then they joined Portland. So it was always kind of separate, but it still was Portland. They had a lot of the workers, the out of town workers and people like that at that school, so they were used to people coming from out of town. However, we found out later that what they did was when they realized that there would be some Japanese coming back into the Portland area, that each school had a meeting deciding how to handle this. And what they did at Roosevelt was they decided who was gonna be your homeroom teacher. And they picked a special one for each grade, each year. And I was very fortunate that I always got who I always felt was absolutely the very best homeroom teacher in the whole school. He was the beloved teacher, the one that everybody went to. And our class had all the leaders in it. We'd had the school presidents, we had the ones who were, you know, in charge of everything. And it was very nice. They were very protective. All the kids in that class were very protective.

TI: Do you recall the homeroom teacher's name?

ST: You know, I was trying to remember that, and that's embarrassing.

TI: No, that's okay. That's all right.

ST: But he was. And...

TI: And so the acceptance coming back was, it sounds like, a pretty good or easy transition for you.

ST: Yes, it was. Everybody took, somebody always is looking out for you. I don't know why, but someone was always looking out for me. At that time, we got that class. Of course, there were not very many Japanese at Roosevelt, and we had only one black family, two kids who were star basketball players, of course. But that was when I first realized how bad it must be down in the South. Because, of course, we had Southerners who had come up to be workers, and they realized quite instantly that they couldn't do things like they did at home. They knew that. But you could tell they were fighting it, you know. They would blush. Some of them were very fair-skinned, and we had one from Texas. And it was very hard for him to be in the same class with a black kid. Whereas the girls really lapped it up. They thought it was wonderful. Well, of course, these were basketball stars. But these boys were just, if you could pick the perfect one to be the only ones in school, that were these two boys.

TI: Good.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.