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MN: Now you had talked a little earlier about Lincoln Grammar School. Can you share with us what your first days were like?

RW: [Laughs] Yeah, well, my first days of kindergarten were days of just flat out crying, just crying and crying. I wanted to go home. I would cry so much that they had to go get my sister and bring her to calm me down, and the days she couldn't calm me down, then they'd have to get my mother to come to school. I guess about by the second half of my kindergarten days, as I got to meet, know friends, then I guess I settled down and didn't have that problem.

MN: Was it because this was the first time you were separated from your family? Is that why you were crying?

RW: Yeah, I guess so, but then my brother and sisters were there, older ones a couple of grades above me. I don't know if it's so much that, I was there separated from home, I just think I didn't like having to be there in the school and I didn't want to be there at all at the school. And most kids nowadays, they like to go to school. They really enjoy it, but I just didn't want to be there.

MN: So when you went to school and you had to bring lunch, what kind of lunch did you bring?

RW: We always took our lunch. I took a bag lunch, a sandwich and maybe a fruit, and my mom would make it and there was always a sandwich or something. It was never a, never a nigiri or anything because I was too embarrassed to eat a nigiri at school. But one day we were having lunch and my friend was, Bob Madrid, we were there eating and I told him, "Hey, you like rice balls. Why don't we trade? Why don't you bring a burrito and I'll trade you?" So about once a week or twice a week I'd take a nigiri, just a rice ball with umeboshi in it, and he'd bring a burrito and we'd exchange. Then we'd sit there and we'd eat it in front of the others, we didn't care what people thought. The only thing I remember about bag lunch was that one day when it was lunchtime I opened up my lunch and I started to eat the sandwich and I thought something was funny, and I opened it up, there's nothing in there, just mustard and bread. [Laughs] My mom forgot to put the meat in it, usually it was baloney or something, and she forgot to put that in the sandwich.

MN: You mentioned Bob Madrid, and you and him became good friends since the kindergarten? Is that...

RW: Yeah. We met, I think that's when I probably stopped crying, once I got to know him and some of the other kids, and then it was a little more fun to be there.

MN: Did he ever tease you about your first few days in school?

RW: No. You know, I went all the way through high school with him, except for when I was in camp, and we never talked about it. He never mentioned it and we never talked about our grammar school days, other than when we used to play sports together in the elementary school. They had a league of all the elementary schools, football and baseball, basketball, and so we looked forward to that, playing sports. It was always our aim to beat the rich kid school from the other side of town. [Laughs] That was our goal. I talked to some of the later high school classmates that lived over on the other fifty-fifty schools that were minority. They said the same thing, yeah, they always wanted to beat Kingsbury because that's where the rich kids came from, that type of thing. It was a little rivalry, but nothing serious.

MN: So was, like, Lincoln able to beat Kingsbury a lot?

RW: Well, if I remember right, yeah, I think we did beat 'em, but I don't think we beat 'em a lot. I think they beat us too, so it was sometimes yes, sometimes no.

MN: Now, when you were in the third grade you temporarily went to Emory School in Nestor, California. Why did you go down to Emory School?

RW: Emory school was a school down in an area called Nestor or Palm City, south of San Diego, right down at the border. My sister with her husband was farming there well before the war. And when her first baby was being born, then my mother went to help her, so of course, being the baby of the family, she took me with her and so I enrolled at that Emory School while we were there for about three months. And so that's where I met a lot of San Diego people. And then, of course, my sister and her husband were well known in that area as farmers, big time farmers, so that was why we were down there. The odd thing about that time was when we were coming home, and my brother-in-law -- my sister's husband was from Japan and was from Hiroshima too, from Etajima, so that's how they got married, because they had a baishakunin marriage -- so when we were coming back, when my brother-in-law's driving us back to Redlands, we were coming up through the back area of the Vista area, and the immigration stopped us and they asked for papers. He didn't have his papers, my mother forgot her passport in Redlands, and so they were detaining us and it started getting scary. I was asking, "Mama, Mama, what's gonna happen? What's going on?" She says, "Well, that's okay, that's okay," so she showed 'em my school papers, said, "This is my son. This is his school papers," and then of course they're not fluent in English, so it took quite a while. They finally let 'em both go, but it was kind of scary because my brother-in-law didn't have papers and my mother's passport was at home, and I guess the only thing that really solved anything was the fact that I was her son. I don't know how she proved that, other than the school papers.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.