<Begin Segment 24>

MN: So now you are leaving camp, and you said you left for Santa Ana?

YK: Yes, Santa Ana.

MN: Why was your destination Santa Ana?

YK: Well, I guess they knew that there was this apartment complex where we could go to. So it was only about five or six families, and so we got there in the middle of the night and had to wake up the owners. So we were in Santa Ana, and then there was one girl there about my age, and so she showed us how we catch the bus to school and sent us to the administration. They assigned us to our classes. On the first day of class at recess, the teacher took me aside and said, "You ought to take on an English name, then maybe you'll be more accepted," 'cause there were a few of us Japanese in that elementary school. And she said, "What do you want to be called?" I said, "I don't know." She said, "What about George?" I said, "Well, okay," so I became George. But we were in Santa Ana only a couple of months, and we moved to Long Beach where we were in a trailer camp. So we were in these little aluminum trailers where only two people could sleep in there. So we had, I guess, probably about three of four trailers that we lived in, and again, you had to go to the outhouse and for laundry and everything 'cause the trailers didn't have any plumbing. But... and at that time, too, I was still in the seventh grade, I'd been in the seventh grade for about three years. So it was January, so towards the end of it, in the second semester when we started. But we had to take a bus to the center of town, Long Beach, and went to junior high school there. So the only classes that were left were woodshop and music. So the music was easy enough because we just listened to records and memorized the names of the authors, and we'd always done the Hit Parade ones. Then the woodshop, I never made anything in my life, 'cause I always had five older brothers, so I didn't know how to saw or use a hammer or anything. And here we were in woodshop using these mechanical buzz saws. Luckily I didn't cut any fingers off, but I made my first sort of, I guess, book hangers, holders, and also my first footstool, which was my prize possession, I kept all my life.

MN: I think your mother used that also, right?

YK: Yeah, later on, then she used it. So anyway, after the semester was about over, then the counselor at the school said, "Hey, you're kind of old." But by then, May 30th, I became fifteen years old. He said, "You're kind of old to just be getting out of seventh grade." I said, "Well, yeah, I'm two years behind." So he said, "Why don't you go to summer school and we'll see how you do, and maybe we can have you skip to eighth grade." So I went to summer school, studied like mad, and I got all A's. He says, "Congratulations, you're now in the ninth grade." And he was the vice principal of the new school on the west side that we went to.

MN: So this, when you were going to the other junior high school, what was that junior high school called?

YK: William Logan Stevenson Junior High School.

MN: But that was a new high school, right?

YK: Yeah, it was brand new.

MN: Junior high school, I'm sorry.

YK: Yeah, it was a new junior high. All of a sudden, I was in the ninth grade and in algebra, and here I had almost no math background. So algebra was extremely tough for me. I had a very poor math foundation.

MN: But you skipped from seventh to ninth grade when you went into the William Logan Stevenson Junior High.

YK: Right.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.