<Begin Segment 5>

SF: You had talked to me earlier about your education and so by the time you got to high school, what was Stockton High School like?

SI: Stockton High School was a very large school of over 5,000 students. As I look back now, there were a large number of Itos in the family. There were a large number of Wongs and Chinese. I think the Japanese community in Stockton was fairly large because it drew from all of the surrounding farm areas. It was, to me, a very pleasant atmosphere. The teachers were, some were very good. In fact, my continued love for biology started with a high school teacher, Mr. Snook, who was an expert on snails. He'd written a couple of books classifying snails, and he was a high school teacher. He taught with such sincerity and such knowledge of the whole field and the love for it, that it just inspired me that anyone would spend time with young sophomores -- I guess, I was, I must have been fourteen or so -- and instill this knowledge of basic biology. And I think one of my most inspiring teachers was this public school teacher who really impressed me with his knowledge and transferred it to students. So, other than that we had good math teachers. I remember taking algebra and almost flunking the first year, and I had the same teacher and took geometry and I did superbly. The teacher's name was Mr. Walker and he kept me after class one day and he says, "How come you had such a tough time in algebra and you don't in geometry?" Well, I really don't know, but this was my transition from the country grade schools to the eighth grade, which I had struggled through and so forth. On the other hand, because I was of Japanese origin and the Japanese students had such a good reputation for academic excellence, I signed up for German when I was a freshman, and they put me in with juniors and seniors in this beginning German class. And I was completely lost, completely lost, because I had no idea what a single German word was like. And I had a very sympathetic teacher, she was French, DeRouche was her name, and I was the only freshman in the class. She sort of guided me through and helped me. I never got very good in German, but I took it for a number of years. I can converse in German almost like I can in Japanese.

SF: This was going to really help you later on in the war.

SI: So being thrown way above your head into a class and you swim. If you sink, you do, but you try to keep your head above water. And I think experience has shown in many cases where students are thrown into a situation, and they struggle like mad to begin with, but they eventually can make it. I will never be a linguist and I don't want to be, but we had to pass -- in our graduate school we had to pass French and German equivalent. I could read much better than I could speak unless I drank a lot of beer, then I could, my German gets to be pretty good my German friends tell me.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.