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MN: How many children did your parents have all together?

Mo N: Three.

MN: And where are you?

Mo N: I'm the first.

MN: And when were you born?

Mo N: 1936, August 11th.

MN: Where were you born?

Mo N: I was born at the Japanese hospital on First and Fickett.

MN: And what is your birth name? Your birth name?

Mo N: Oh, Vaughn Moritsugu Nishida.

MN: There's a story behind this. Can you share the story?

Mo N: Yeah, that Vaughn, I never liked that name, it used to give me the heebie-jeebies. But yeah, my mother, I asked my mother about it, and she never told me herself. My sisters say that she told them that I was named after Vaughn Monroe, but Vaughn Monroe, the movie star and singer and all that kind of stuff, and the way he spells his name is V-A-U-G-H-N. And I think, if that's the case, then my mom was doubly kind of embarrassed, 'cause she didn't know how to spell "Vaughn," right? So I never used that name my whole life. The only time I had to use it was like when I was in the army. But then it's usually, they use your last name, so it's no big deal. It's only now that I've come to terms with it, and I'm seventy-five now. [Laughs]

MN: So what school did you... you know, for kindergarten, which kindergarten did you go to?

Mo N: Well, kindergarten, prewar, I went to Thirty-sixth Street School. Yeah, and then the war broke out and we went to camp. So camp was first through third grade.

MN: Don't go to camp yet, let's stay before the war.

Mo N: Okay.

MN: So at Thirty-sixth Street School, what was the ethnic makeup of the students?

Mo N: It's hard to remember, but I think it was predominately white, some Asian, and some black. And in those days, well, I don't remember the housing pattern before the war, I just knew where I lived and the people I grew up with. I grew up with some black kids and Buddhahead kids. But after the war, when we come back -- this is during segregation, so there's a finger of people of color, Japanese and black, that move along from Central Avenue, San Pedro, down Jefferson all the way to Normandie and Western. So that's... and white all around that, and white above Adams, white below the railroad tracks at Exposition. So I pretty much assumed that it must have been like that before the war, but the western penetration wasn't all that high. There'd still be a lot of whites left. In fact, when I went to Foshay, it was mostly white.

MN: So when you were at the Thirty-sixth Street School, though, who were your playmates then?

Mo N: Well, most of my playmates were local Japanese kids. But, yeah, I don't have a lot of recollection of people, of the kids there. I have a picture in the family that goes back to the Senshin Gakuen, must have been preschool at Senshin. And all my friends, they're people that I still know, are in that picture, so I'm assuming that those were probably the kids that I played with.

MN: So do you remember what kind of games you played at that time? Or what was your neighborhood like in that area?

Mo N: Well, like I shared before, about where I lived, I vaguely recall there was a black kid that I used to play with and another Japanese kid, and so they were mainly Buddhahead. And like I was sharing, we had this haunted house down about half a dozen houses from east of where I lived. And so when we were kids, we used to go over there, and I peeked through the window to see if we could see the ghost and all of that kind of stuff, yeah.

MN: Now why was this house considered haunted?

Mo N: Huh?

MN: Why was this house considered haunted?

Mo N: Well, they claimed that somebody was murdered there.

MN: Now you had some recollections about visiting your mother's parents' house? Like they had a big yard in the front?

Mo N: Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just got the confirmation from my auntie about that, that it's just west of Normandie on Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth, so it's right in the neighborhood. With that big yard, and the recollection that I have most clearly about when we were gonna eat chicken one night, they got a live one. And what we used to do was you put it on, you tie the wings up and put it on the ground, you chop its head off. And my uncle swung and he missed the neck and chopped off half the head, and then the chicken got up and started running around the whole yard and all of us were chasing after it. So it was... I guess that should stick in any kid's mind. [Laughs]

MN: And then another time you had to go to the doctor's?

Mo N: Yeah. Okay, yeah, that's pretty clear in my mind, too. Being a little kid and being real curious, my mother, the washing machine they had in those days used to be, they had that agitator. And then after you got through washing and rinsing, you had to put it through the rollers that were above the machine. And apparently I got my hand caught in that sucker and went up to my elbow. So my mom, I guess they decided they're going to take me to the doctor, so they took me to the doctor, and I guess I cried all the way there and cried all the way back. And so to shut me up, my dad and my uncle decided, "Well, we better give him some ice cream," so I guess that shut me up. But they used to have Curry's ice cream stand up by SC right there on Hoover and Jefferson. And they used to this one called Mile High ice cream cone, with that sugar cone. And they had the... wait, I don't know how in the hell they did it, but the ice cream was scooped up, it looked like that cone, except it went the other way. So you had this big old ice cream cone. I got me some good ice cream. Paid a little dues, but I got some good ice cream. [Laughs]

MN: What memories do you have of visiting Terminal Island?

Mo N: Oh, yeah, yeah. See, a lot of this stuff going back to that time, you don't know if it's a dream, if you dreamed it up, or you actually experienced it. But my recollection is that my dad, as a part of his business or whatever we ended up down in Terminal Island. That's what I distinctly remember, Terminal Island. And it was like we were on a... well, like a Japanese village, I guess. I didn't know what a Japanese village was like. Had these little clapboard houses, and that plank sidewalk, and ran right down to the beach. And then on the beach they had this iron tripod for a pot, cooking up there, and apparently they had tako inside there, cooking octopus. I distinctly remember that. I'm not sure why, but I distinctly remember that. When I talk to people, they say they used to do that, so I guess it wasn't a dream. But I don't remember if I ate any or not, though. That's the part that kind of trips me out. I would have liked to try that. [Laughs]

<End Segment 4> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.