<Begin Segment 12>

MN: Now, I don't know which house you were in, but you were talking about how television was coming in?

TN: Oh, that's at the East L.A., the first one. Around 1950 or '51, people are starting to get TVs but we didn't have one. So we would go get invited over to my neighbor's, this Mexican American family, to go watch boxing or something, or roller derby. All the stuff little kids like at the Canos.

MN: Who were the... you talk about wrestling, at that time, who were the popular people wrestling at the time?

TN: There was this white guy named Gorgeous George, he had permed hair and all that stuff, I guess. He was a villain. The Great Togo, Mr. Moto, were the Japanese villains. And Kimon Kudo, he was a Japanese good guy. So we would root for Moto and Togo and Kudo. They all had easy to pronounce names, too, only two syllables. I don't know if that was their real names, probably not.

MN: So since this was just after the war, it was fashionable I guess to have Japanese bad guys.

TN: Yeah. Well, that was about 1950.

MN: Did they have any bad Germans and Italian wrestlers?

TN: Yeah, I remember Baron Leone, Anton Leone or something, bad guy, Italian with long hair, always played dirty. But they balanced it out by having a good guy Italian from Argentina, named Argentine Roca, I don't know his first name.

MN: So how did it feel to see these Japanese American wrestlers on TV?

TN: Pretty good. See some of our own on TV.

MN: Even if they played the bad guy?

TN: Yeah, it's okay. We kind of knew wrestling was fake, anyway. Or rassling, R-A-S-S-L-I-N-G.

[Interruption]

MN: So you're living in East L.A.. Which Japanese school did you start attending?

TN: I think we went to Daichi Gakuen first, which was near what is now Fukui Mortuary, around there. I don't know how long we went there. But one time for a little while we went to a Japanese school that was in the Union Church.

MN: Now that's the old Union Church building.

TN: Right.

MN: Today, that's the East West Players'...

TN: Ah, whatever you call it, yeah.

MN: So when you started Japanese school at the old Union Church and Daichi Gakuen, did you go every day or just Saturdays?

TN: Saturdays, always on Saturdays. So by the next weekend, we would forget some of what we learned.

MN: So how did you feel about going to Japanese school?

TN: It was okay. But lot of my friends were not going in there, just playing around on Saturdays. But my parents wanted me to go anyway.

MN: And then meanwhile, you're moving from one junior high school to the next. In any of these junior high schools in East L.A., did you have any problems with the Latino gangs?

TN: Not really. I think in the sixth grade, one of the wannabe Latino gangsters, he was kind of like my buddy or protector or something, took a liking to me. That's all.

MN: They didn't bother you.

TN: Well, nobody bothered anybody anyway, except for, I think, he beat up some Jewish guy, then the next week the guy transferred somewhere.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.