<Begin Segment 26>

AI: Well now, tell me, about this time you were have, starting your family. Tell me about your children.

LK: Oh, I have three daughters. My first one was born in '49 and the second was born in '50 and my youngest one was born 1956. And we're a typical family where my husband was looking for a boy each time. [Laughs] And my three daughters have, well, between the three of them we have four granddaughters also. So poor Shiro, he was surrounded by women. [Laughs] But he loved it.

AI: Well now, as your family grew and you had your children, you moved to a... tell me about looking for your first home, your first house.

LK: Oh, the first house, it was very difficult. We, because I had one child and expecting another one, my parents urged me to look for a house and they were in Minneapolis yet. But they sent us a couple thousand dollars to use as a down payment, so we started looking for a house and we did suffer discrimination, housing discrimination because the north end they didn't want to show us anything and then West Seattle, they told my husband -- one real estate office told my husband that they're saving the homes for veterans returning from war, returning veterans. And so he got mad and he said, "What do you think I am?" So anyhow, he was very conscious of the fact and he almost had a chip on his shoulder defying anyone to discriminate against him.

AI: But even though he made it very clear that he was a vet, still they would not...

LK: No, they just didn't, wouldn't show us, you know, so we... then we decided, well we, we don't want our children to have to have to suffer any discrimination, so we decided we better just look where they would show us. So we found our first home in Madrona. We lived there about eight years. And then this was our second home.

[Interruption]

AI: So you lived in the Madrona area for eight years and your kids were getting a little bit older and you were thinking about moving to another place. What was it like when you were looking for, for the next house?

LK: Well, it took me about a year to find a home, a second house. My husband was busy. By then he was an automobile salesman so he was very busy. So I did most of the running around and when we finally started looking around the Seward Park area there was still this barrier where we couldn't go buy a, look for homes down in the nicer area. We were restricted to this side of Fiftieth, west of Fiftieth right here. And so again, we felt that we didn't want our children to suffer any discrimination, we don't want to go where we're not wanted. So we did settle on this house. But I do remember going to look at a new development like I would say going towards Skyway, but south of Rainier Beach and they had this open house and the salesman wouldn't even look at us. He wouldn't even show us anything and there was no other customers there.

AI: And what year was this?

LK: That was 1956, '57.

AI: So even that much...

LK: Even then.

AI: ...later after the war, people were still...

LK: Yes. And so, then again, we said, "If they don't want us around here, we won't buy around here," you know. So...

AI: And you were saying that you were concerned for your children.

LK: Yes.

AI: And that you didn't want them to have negative experiences. What, do you, did you think that your children did face much negative prejudice?

LK: No.

AI: As children?

LK: I think we did protect them, so I don't think they suffered it.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.