<Begin Segment 19>

MN: When did you folks get married?

YH: March the 17th, 1951. That's St. Patrick's Day.

MN: What was your wedding dress like? Did your mother make it for you?

YH: I made that wedding dress. It was made out of French silk satin, and it had long sleeves, a boatneck line, and the sleeves had these little buttons all the way up to the elbow. And then it had a dipping hem, you know, the knee, and it dipped down.

MN: How long did it take you to make that?

YH: Oh gee, I don't remember how long it took. Maybe about a month? I don't know. The hardest part was to get those buttons on the sleeves.

MN: Do you still have that wedding dress?

YH: No.

MN: What happened to it?

YH: I don't know. 'Cause in one of the apartments that we lived there was a fire, so it might've gotten burned in that fire.

MN: Now, before you got married to William, did you have any idea he'd turn out to be this staunch civil rights advocate?

YH: No.

MN: Which church did you folks get married in?

YH: The First Baptist Church in Chicago.

MN: Did Tom Tajiri, was he the best man?

YH: No, it was Akira Hirami. Well, he wasn't the best man, but he came in just before the ceremony was to begin and then William said, "You're gonna be my best man." [Laughs] Yeah. He lives in Colorado now.

MN: Where did you folks honeymoon?

YH: New Orleans, Louisiana.

MN: Can you share with us how, as newlyweds, how you experienced the segregation in New Orleans?

YH: Yeah, we got on the train, the public train to go someplace, and when we got on the train we could see that the blacks were in the back of the train and the whites were in the front of the train, and so we stood up in the middle of the train. And after that if we wanted to have transportation we walked or took the cab. We could see the water fountain for blacks, the water fountain for whites. Everything was segregated there. That was really a jolt.

MN: So when, when you saw, this which section did you go to? Like in, for water fountains, did you go to the whites'?

YH: No, we didn't, we didn't have any water. We didn't go to any of the fountains. And then I, we weren't segregated on the waterfront because they had coffee and donuts freshly made and a lot of people were there early in the morning having coffee and donuts. And I don't remember seeing any blacks there. And then when we went to the restaurants I don't remember seeing any blacks in the restaurants. I think it was just too expensive for blacks to go to the restaurants.

MN: Who picked New Orleans for your honeymoon?

YH: I think William did.

MN: For, do you know why he picked New Orleans?

YH: [Shakes head] 'Cause I, probably it was the cheapest way to go, because we weren't making much money, and William had just graduated from the University of Chicago and he was working in the parts department of a sports car dealer. And I think I was working for the PTA, so I wasn't making much money. So you could just get on the IC and go to New Orleans and that didn't cost very much money. And this is right after the Mardi Gras, so the town was pretty empty 'cause all the revelers had gone home.

MN: So you did all the touristy things like going to the French Quarter?

YH: Yeah.

MN: What memories do you have of...

YH: Then went to Lake Pontchartrain, and we went to, I think it was called the White House, but it was a store, a department store, I think it was French. It wasn't the White House, it was something like the Blanca something or other. And I bought a fancy scarf there.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.