<Begin Segment 4>

JG: What do you know about... so your family grew up in Boyle Heights, tell me a little about your own family, your siblings? How many, do you have any siblings?

GF: Well, to clarify something, my mother grew up in Boyle Heights. My father grew up in the mortuary, 'cause there's a residence upstairs. My father and my grandfather.

JG: Is that residence still there today?

GF: It's still there today.

JG: Does anyone occupy it?

GF: Just boxes, storage mainly.

JG: So he grew up in the mortuary.

GF: Yes, he did.

JG: Oh, wow.

GF: And if you saw the mortuary you would think, oh, that looks like a modern building, but it's, it's had a facelift, and we've put a facade around the outside of it. So it is circa eighteen, late 1800s, when it was built. Now, you asked me about my siblings. I have two. I have two sisters.

JG: Okay, what are their names?

GF: Cathy and then Chris. And they're both older than I am. They're, we're all about a year and a half apart. Cathy was born in 1949 in Japan, and then Chris and I were born here, at the Japanese hospital.

JG: Okay. What was your neighborhood like when you were growing up? What are your memories of growing up in Boyle Heights?

GF: Well, actually, when I was born, by that time my father had bought a house, and so we were living probably in the Olympic area, around Olympic and Arlington.

JG: Oh, okay. What are your memories of that neighborhood?

GF: Oh, quiet, clean, safe. I remember going outside on my own all the time, playing, just by myself. There's no worries. Not like there is today. I would never allow my kids, although they're grown up, but I would've never allowed my kids, in the past, to go out without watching them, having an eye on them. But there were no fears, no danger of that as there is now. We had another Japanese mortuary that was living just south of us and a Hispanic mortuary of -- did I say mortuary?

JG: Mortuary.

GF: I did, didn't I? A Japanese family living, just couple blocks south of us, and a Hispanic family, and I got along with both of 'em, 'cause they're all around my age. And I remember we used to go running around the neighborhood playing.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.