<Begin Segment 13>

TI: Okay, so we're about halfway through and I want to keep going, so I'm gonna keep pushing you along here.

FC: Can I take a break and...

TI: You want to take a short break?

FC: I want to just take a sip of water.

TI: Okay, yeah, take a sip. Before we go to the war I just wanted, there was, something in your bio that struck me was your father's golfing. And so, so let's go to the 1940s and it sounds like the business has been going well and your father's able to have a little bit of leisure time, and so tell me about that.

FC: Yeah, so I don't know how he got going, but he did start playing golf. It was difficult for him at the beginning 'cause he had no control over this tiny little ball, and I think he told a story of getting so frustrated he broke the clubs and tossed it in the pond and left. But his friends wouldn't let him quit, so he continued and he really became involved with it and he loved golf, so every Sunday he would trudge out to the links. And he belonged to a golf club with Isseis and some Niseis. They were called the Yojioki Club, which I didn't, never understood, but it means, yoji is four o'clock, oki is waking up, so you know, four o'clock wakers club. [Laughs]

TI: Interesting. Do you know how large, how many people were in this club?

FC: I'm sure there must've been close to two dozen guys.

TI: And they'd wake up early in the morning...

FC: And they'd trudge out to play golf, and yeah, they were playing every Sunday. And he prided himself in playing eight eighteen rounds in one week, so one week he played two eighteen rounds on a single day, and then he played every other day of the week.

TI: So I'm sorry, say it, so he played eight, how many rounds in one week he played?

FC: He played eight rounds in seven days.

TI: Eight rounds in one week, seven days. Okay.

FC: And so that was his pride. And he came home with trophies and things like that. He truly, he truly loved his golf. In fact, he was playing in Long Beach on the golf course which bordered Douglas Aircraft, and they were playing when the security guard said, "I think you guys need to go home." And he looked at him and he said, what are you talking about it? He said, "Don't you know that Japan just bombed Pearl Harbor?"

TI: Oh, so he was on the course next to a, I guess, a defense contractor on December 7th. Interesting.

FC: [Laughs] That's how he found out the war had started.

TI: That's interesting.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.