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[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

AH: And by that time, I had gotten to the fifth grade at Wilson Grammar School in Little Ferry, New Jersey, and my brother had finished the seventh grade there. So I was ten and he was twelve, and my dad was starting to think about college. And even though he was a high school dropout -- my mom finished high school, but my father never did finish high school -- he wanted desperately to have my brother and I, you know, go to the university. He knew about the University of California and about how inexpensive higher education was in California. So one evening, my dad called the family into the living room, and he spread out a map of the United States on the living room rug. And he circled Little Ferry on the East Coast, and then circled San Luis Obispo on the West Coast. And he said, "We're going to move from here to there." My grandparents, at that particular time, were on a visit to relatives out in North Dakota. My dad never would have been able to leave the East Coast, being the oldest son in the family. And so he took the opportunity presented to him of my grandparents being absent, to make the move. We sold the house and we went around and visited all of my parents' siblings and their families, and got packed in the family car. The only thing we took in the car was a new set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas, and my brother and I sat on those Britannicas. We had our dog Lucky with us in the backseat, while my mother and my father were in the front seat, and we never stopped at a motel the whole way across the United States. My dad drove furiously across the United States, you know, for four days, and most of it was on Route 66. This was before I heard the Bobby Troup song about "getting your kicks on Route 66." But we would sleep out under the stars in different sorts of places.

And the first place we got to in California, where we actually stayed at a motel, was Needles. Now, Needles was not my idea of California. When we told people in New Jersey that we were going to move to California, they were so envious, they just kept talking about that. And so then here going across the country we went through places like Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. I don't know if this was what my idea of the West was, but it really was majestic and different from the East Coast. I mean, I learned how to swim in Coney Island, where when you went to the beach, you had, like, a couple of square feet to be able to just sit down. I mean, it really was crowded. And then we go across these spacious sorts of places, and we went past Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff; we drove on Route 66 right past that college. And then we also had gone, before that, through Albuquerque. We stopped in Albuquerque, and my dad said, "You know, I like Albuquerque." And he said, "If it doesn't work out in San Luis Obispo, we're going to come back and live in Albuquerque." Well, we didn't have to come back.

Now, when we got to Needles, we went to see Riverside. And this was, you know, in 1949. Smog started to hit southern California during World War II. So 1943, 1944 is when smog starts to come in. But the air was still pretty clear in 1949. Now, Riverside is the smog capital, but at that time, I thought it was beautiful. If you drive through Riverside now, on a clear day, you can see that they have these stylized mountains. It really looks like the picture that you have in your mind of, you know, California, the ideal sort of place. And we went and stayed at a motel there, went to a park at night, and took a rowboat ride and everything. I just thought I'd died and gone to heaven instead of Riverside. Now if I go to Riverside, I think I'm going to the other side of heaven. But at that particular time, I thought it was absolutely beautiful. And then we got in the car and we just drove through Los Angeles. The 5 Freeway wasn't there yet, because that didn't come through Los Angeles 'til 1955. But we came through Los Angeles and we kept going, and we got to Santa Barbara. And my goodness, all four of us, my mother and my father and my brother Roy and I just fell in love with Santa Barbara. It was so spectacularly gorgeous. Palm trees, the ocean, the mountains, and everything, it was really incredible. Now, my dad had been a sign painter, so what we did to check out an area was we drove all around the town and looked at the signs, and looked at the little signature on them to see how many sign painters he would have for competition. Because if there were too many sign painters, he said, we weren't going to stay there no matter how beautiful it was. Well, we drove out to Goleta, which was not then the home of the University of California, Santa Barbara, but in a few years it would be. We drove out to Goleta and we stayed in an old motor court, and that's what they called them then instead of motels. That place is still there. It was called the Camel Motor Court; it's since changed its name, but it's the same as it was: these little tiny cabins that are sitting there in the middle of Goleta. And Goleta was largely a Mexican community, and we got to Goleta and we stayed at the Camel Motor Court, and my dad started talking to somebody in the court there. And he said, "Well, you know, I'm coming out here 'cause I want my kids to go up to San Luis Obispo because I want them to enroll in Cal Tech. I want them to be scientists and engineers." And the person says, "That's not Cal Tech up at San Luis Obispo, that's Cal Poly, that's a school for agriculture." And a lot of Japanese Americans had gone there over the years because the Nisei were going to learn scientific agriculture and come back and take over the family farms.

So anyway, my dad said, "We're not going to go up to San Luis Obispo, then," and so we didn't go to San Luis Obispo. We got a house right down the street from the motel and we lived in Goleta. And that's where I enrolled in school, at Goleta Union School, in the sixth grade, and I only stayed there for one year, and after that, I started going to schools in Santa Barbara because they would bus you in there. I went to La Cumbre Junior High School for three years through the ninth grade and then I went to Santa Barbara High School through the twelfth grade and I graduated in 1956.

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