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MN: So how did you spend your childhood days in this very vibrant neighborhood?

JM: Well, a lot of times I used to come out here because I used to like to go dumpster diving. Not the food dumpster, but they had a lot of businesses out here, and they would throw away all their cardboard boxes and all their containers. And I used to like to jump into those big container, dumping containers, and strip out the postage stamps. So I had a little collection of stamps going. Things like that. And I'd spend a lot of my time hitting up these drunks for pennies. You know, there's nothing like a staggering drunk, and I'd go up to him and I'd say, "Mister, can I have a penny?" Of course they see me and they'd fish around in their pocket and they'd drop a penny in my hand, and boy, I'd be gone, heading for that corner store and I'd by me an Abba Zaba bar or Oh Henry! or... I'm paying for it today with all my root canals, you know. Oh, gosh, I should have never eaten that. And this was going on for quite a while. I'm hitting people up and running to the store, until one day, I ran into that store to get my allotment of candy, my sister was staring at me because they had hired her as a clerk. I said, oh, and that was it, you know. That blew that.

But there was one other thing, too, we used to, I used to like to do, is they had this thing called Wing cigarettes, Wing, W-I-N-G. And when you opened it up, every Wing cigarette had a picture of an airplane. They were like baseball cards. So I would, I would wait around at the local drugstore, and a guy would come out with a Wing, package of Wings, and I'd follow that fellow. Sooner or later, he'd open that thing, and you know, they'd toss that, he'd toss that little card out, and boy, it'd never hit the ground. Shoom. [Laughs] I would have another, another thing for my collection of airplanes.

And then, once in a while, they would have this thing called gin gami undo, which is the effort to collect tinfoil. And so they had us, they had us doing that. We would, again, find empty cigarette packets, and they had it, they used to wrap it in tinfoil, so we used to strip the tinfoil and roll it into little balls. And I forgot who used to collect 'em, but it went for the war effort in Japan. So I always, I always hate to think that it might have come back at us at Pearl Harbor. I hope not. They had us doing a lot of strange things.

And once in a while -- and I can't explain why I did this, and I'm sorry I did -- I found a shotput. And I used to go around, and these nice ladies would have their little gardens, and I used to drop, I used to drop the shotput on those little plants, you know. Oh, boy, were they PO'd. I remember one old lady one time looking at me and she said, "Is that the one?" This was in Manzanar. It was sort of like, "What is he?" I can't explain it. Just, just bad things kids do.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.