<Begin Segment 4>

MN: And I want to go back to one thing you said. You mentioned Fish Harbor, so that's another terminology referring to Terminal Island? [JM nods] What was it like growing up on Terminal Island, what kind of activities did the children do?

JM: All kinds. It's wide open space, a lot of sandlot, and we used to play football on the sandlot, and baseball. And they built a baseball field, a professional baseball field. They brought sand in and really packed it in. They made a real nice baseball (field) and the San Pedro Skippers were very highly rated. The Terminal Islanders, had to cross the ferry to go to junior high school and high school, and it's all uphill and about twelve, fifteen blocks. We're all practically running, so our legs were real strong, so we all excelled in baseball, judo, kendo, all the sports.

MN: I do hear that a lot. Terminal Island had a reputation for being very strong in all of those. Now were you part of the judo team?

JM: No. I wanted to get into judo. My uncle wanted me to go in kendo. But my doctor says don't take judo 'cause it's too strenuous. He said I had a heart condition, but later we found out that I didn't have the heart condition; the doctor was wrong. So I missed out.

MN: But you still did judo informally?

JM: Right.

MN: You just were not on the team.

JM: Yes, we did judo on the sandlot.

MN: Terminal Islanders also had a strong reputation, a big reputation for being strong swimmers. How did you learn how to swim?

JM: At the beach. They had a beach and it was kind of sheltered, so it's easy to swim. Then we went to the wharf, Fish Harbor, and the older guys, they'd grab a hold of us, we had the cork life buoy -- we don't need it 'cause we know how to swim, but it's scary to go into the deep water -- so they'd come in and they'd take the cork off and dump us in the ocean. And we'd go deep. Oh, we can't touch the bottom. It's scary. [Laughs] Eventually we come up, then naturally we know how to swim, so we swam. But in case we can't swim, the older guys would jump in.

MN: Tell me about how you made money at the wharf.

JM: In Terminal Island?

MN: Uh-huh.

JM: I wasn't working.

MN: No, I mean the older people would...

JM: Oh, oh, lot of them, they went fishing, so they were making good money. They were paying, like I was talking to a couple of guys in high school, they used to go on the boat during the summertime. They said they made about ninety dollars a month, and that's a lot of money.

MN: I was referring to when they tossed coins in the water.

JM: [Laughs] Oh, yeah. By the wharf they'd toss a coin and coin goes pretty fast, if it's straight, so we're all swimming by the (wharf) and a whole lot of people, they'd come and throw coins and we used to dive in. Sometimes we had to go all the way to the bottom then rush to the top, 'cause it was pretty deep.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.