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SY: I wanted to back up just a little and talk about when you came back to Los Angeles after the war. We didn't mention what you ended up going to high school in the Seinan area?

PS: Yes.

SY: So that was all... your high school education was all postwar?

PS: Yes, right. I went to... I came back in junior high school I was about seventh or eighth grade. At Foshay junior, Foshay Junior High School is just north of Exposition, close to Western, right at Western and Exposition and Exposition was more or less the color line. North of Exposition was black and Asian, and south was white by law. So my folks tried to buy a home on Thirty-seventh Place which was a couple of blocks north of Exposition which was still in the prohibited zone, that is the zone that had restrictive covenants in the deeds to the house, which prohibited the owner from selling to somebody other than another white person. So in 1947, I believe, we moved in and I remember this white man who was going door to door soliciting the white people in the neighborhood to sign a petition to force us to move out. So it was a very... it made an impression on me to think that somebody would have that kind of power once we were moved in to force us to move out because the widow, the white widow that sold us this house had violated law because she couldn't sell it to anybody other than a white person. So fortunately the Supreme Court made a decision largely due to Thurgood Marshall that made the restrictive covenants in the deeds to the homes unconstitutional. And after that point the complexion of the neighborhood... the color line vanished and it just revolutionized things.

SY: So you ended up staying there?

PS: Yeah, we didn't have to move. But you know, I think it's these kinds of things that are part of the impression that is made on people who are impressionable and I was thirteen or fourteen coming out of a camp that you were put into because of who you are. Coming back to a situation where somebody's trying to force you to move, who you are, it affects you, it makes you have second thoughts about your identity and so that was another part of it.

SY: And even though then most of your friends were Asian right or other JAs?

PS: Yes.

SY: And Foshay was... since it was in this --

PS: Yeah, I look at their annual and it was, gee, about half and half. I mean I would say majority white. They all came from south of Exposition.

SY: So then when you graduated from high school where...

PS: I went to Manual Arts. My sister, it was very common practice for people to use someone else's address who lives in the area where the school you wanted to go to so my sister... I was living in Manual's area so I went to Manual Arts High School where there were very few nonwhite people. My sister went to Poly, most of the Asian kids went to Poly. That was before Poly moved out to the valley. They were on Flower and downtown someplace.

SY: So your sister and you went to separate high schools?

PS: Yeah. I kind of regret not going to Poly. I don't know why I did but I did. I guess the people I knew had gone to Manual or were going to Manual and they seemed to like it but I was a very poor student. I was not motivated. I got B's, never cracked a book, I was very conscientious I carried my books home every night but never looked at 'em. [Laughs] So I was not a very good student. I don't know just to what extent it was a function of my identity or just what it was but I... and then my parents were not getting along that well. I think that probably added to it. So, but anyways, I graduated from Manual, went to LACC for a year or two.

SY: Community college.

PS: Yeah, the community college, Los Angeles City College up on Vermont and went to work. My dad was working at North American Aviation which eventually moved out to the valley, became Atomics International and then became North American Rockwell, but anyways he was working there and so he did that for a few years. Well, actually it was fairly interesting what happened is this... when he had a gas station, he met this white man who he got to know very well, Jerry Fowler, I still remember his name. He had a job at North American as a machinist so he offered to get my dad a job and so my dad, he was giving up the gas station so he said yes. And my dad had no experience on the machine but he was clever, he could pick anything up. So he put in a good word, my dad got a job there, the only nonwhite person in the whole place. And eventually he got his brother-in-law in, my mother's half-brother, and he got my sister's husband in, my brother-in-law. And so we got our foot in the door but I could see the need for affirmative action because there may not be necessarily an intent to discriminate against people but people get jobs because they know other people. And the people you know if they're all white those are the people who are going to get jobs. And the reason my uncle and my brother-in-law were able to get in is because they knew my dad. And so of course it helps if you're capable of course, if you can do the job, so I've always been a firm believer in affirmative action because you got to break the barriers down somehow and that's the only way to do it, to firmly change things.

SY: So he managed to have a fairly good living, your father then?

PS: Yeah, we did okay, he was on a swing shift and I remember he would be sleeping in the morning when I went to school, and then of course they were having problems getting along and so that made it difficult.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.