<Begin Segment 3>

JG: So you've described some of the qualities that made the neighborhood of Crenshaw special to you, growing up. I wonder if you could describe some of your own kind of early memories of growing up there.

MN: Sure. As I said, historically, it was really kind of an exciting time to be growing up in that part of town, particularly, when I came of age during the '60s and the later, late '60s, early '70s. But my memory of growing up, a lot of growing up there was really shaped by the social climate of the time, mainly the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War. I remember, I can even remember back in elementary school when Cassius Clay, the boxer, later on Muhammad Ali, was gonna fight Sonny Liston, and I think I was in, like, the second or third grade and I remember the African American kids at that time saying, "Gosh, if Sonny Liston beats him, I'm movin' out of, out of the state," and I couldn't figure that out. In my mind, I thought, "What did that have to do with you living, or moving out of town?" But because, as you may recall, Cassius Clay was known as, was supported by the white folks, whereas Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali was really seen as, as the hero of African Americans. That's how forceful, in that respect at least, the social climate was at that time. Also, Vietnam was... America's involvement in Vietnam was starting to escalate, and I vividly remember some people close to me who were either being drafted or had gotten involved in the military by some other ways, being involved in Vietnam. And fortunately they survived the war and were able to go on with their lives and really were unscathed by the war, unlike a lot of other vets who came home. But I also remember one of my relatives, my cousin's husband, actually, who was at the front, and during Vietnam, from the middle to late '60s when he would come home on furloughs, tell us, at least from his point of view, what was happening over there, and when I would listen to his stories and then juxtapose his stories with what I was reading in the papers, I just knew that there was no way for America to, to win this thing, let alone to get out of it unscathed. And it really opened my eyes at that time to the difference between what you read in the papers and the press and to what really happens.

Another seminal event of my childhood was the Watts riots, which was in 1965 here in Los Angeles. That happened when I was ten years old and I vividly remember that time here in Los Angeles. It just so happened my uncle and some partners had a liquor store in Watts at that time, and one of the stories I'll always tell was when the riots broke out, we drove out there to board up the store, thinking that was gonna do any good. And when we got to the front of the store, there was a crowd of people in front, and the people said to my uncle, "Don't worry about the store. We'll guard it. We'll protect it. Nothing will happen to it." And sure enough, after the riots ended, after about two weeks, my uncle's store and a Mom and Pop grocery -- Mom and Pop, we called it a yao yao vegetable store, which was owned by an Issei couple next door to us -- were the only two structures left standing on the street. And those stores, my uncle's store and the Issei store next to us, were on Central Avenue at that time, which was part of the area known as Charcoal Alley during the Watts riots. All the other stores had gotten torched, except for my uncle's store and the store next door to him, and so the question is, well, why us? Why were we spared and not everybody else? And it was because of the relationships that my uncle had fostered during the brief time he had been out there up until that point. By that time he had only been out there maybe three or four years. But what I remember, the way he ran the store -- I was going out there on the weekends to help stock the shelves and everything -- I remember he and I were the only non-African American workers in the store. All the other workers he had hired were African American. A lot of 'em were local high school kids from the area. He had a couple of Latino workers, also, in the store. The other thing I remember was we gave credit to a lot of the customers who came in, which is what a lot of small stores did back then. And to give you an example of how it worked, back then a guy would come in and buy, say, five dollars worth of goods, groceries, maybe a six pack of beer, a half pint of alcohol, whatever, but unlike today where you're required to show proof of ID and, and fill out a bunch of documents with the store, all we did was have people just sign basically a receipt. And we just trusted them that they would come back and pay their bills, and lo and behold, they did. Now, certainly every now and then, a few guys never came back, but I would say nine and a half out of ten people would always come back and make good on their bills. We also cashed people's checks that they got from the county and the city, the first of the month. And again, unlike other stores and check cashing outlets, and definitely unlike these payday lenders that we have today, we didn't have a policy of charging you a percentage of your check. In fact, our only policy was, if we cash your check, we just ask that you buy something. Even if it's just a one penny bubblegum and we cashed a check for fifty or a hundred dollars, that's all we asked. And again, that was our policy and it worked.

Another example of the way my uncle fostered relationships was we had a couple kids from the local high school, Jordan High School there in L.A., who were good athletes, good enough to go off to college and get scholarships, but I recall that on a couple of occasions during the summer my uncle would buy them plane tickets to come home so they could visit their families, 'cause they were getting homesick. And so my uncle did things like that for these kids, just as a way of, of being kind, but also giving them opportunities to come home and visit their families. And so I believe it was because of things like that that my uncle did to foster these relationships that his store and the store next door -- and I'm sure that elderly Issei couple also operated their business in the same ways -- that spared them. But not just spared them, but even went on towards how he was able to make it out there for as long as he was able to make it there.

Nowadays, liquor stores have a bad, bad rap in African American and other ethnic minority neighborhoods, and probably for good reasons, but I've always said that you got to think, back in the '60s, late '50s, when Japanese Americans were coming back, their only opportunities for going into business for themselves, their only opportunities to work in the business world really were to open up small businesses like stores. Big American corporations were not hiring Niseis. Japanese corporations were just now coming over and were not hiring Japanese Americans. Later on they did, but in the early days they didn't. And so for Japanese Americans, particularly Niseis, to go into business, their only chance to get into business was to go into businesses that no one else wanted to do, which were Mom and Pop stores and on top of that stores in areas and neighborhoods that mainstream white businesses considered undesirable. So my uncle's store, while it was, yes, a liquor store, really served a useful purpose in those areas. In fact, I don't have any hard data on it, but again, I just know from those times, a lot of the liquor stores that were owned in minority neighborhoods were run by Japanese Americans, by Niseis, and none of them experienced any, at least so far as I know, any really serious problems in those areas. Again, because I think they ran their businesses and established relationships with the people in those areas the same way that my uncle and his partners did with theirs.

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