<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So you go to Garden Grove Elementary, then you go to high school, after you graduate from high school where did you, what did you do?

YU: I went to Fullerton Junior College for a year and a half.

TI: So this is about...

YU: 1938.

TI: '38. And what were you thinking when you went to college? What did you want to do?

YU: Well, I wasn't thinking too much, but I thought that maybe I'd become a petroleum engineer or something like that, and then that will send me into different parts of the world, like Sumatra or to Middle East or someplace away from the United States.

TI: Wow, so you, at a young age you wanted to travel. You wanted to see the world.

YU: I wanted to see the, I thought there would be a lot of future in the area that has still been unexplored.

TI: Interesting. So petroleum engineer, I mean, when I went to school they would call these chemical engineers, is that kind of...

YU: Right, right, chemical engineer.

TI: 'Cause I actually got my degree in chemical engineering.

YU: Is that right?

TI: So I was recruited by the petroleum industry, people like Chevron, Exxon, people like that. So that's... but it's interesting that you wanted to see the world when you're that age. So you finished Fullerton Junior College?

YU: No, I didn't finish Fullerton Junior College, because I was getting tired of it and it was -- not tired, but I said, well, it looks like we weren't gonna get anyplace. Because we look around all over and all the Nikkei graduates from UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC, they're all working in the fruit stand, and nobody was -- there's a fellow from Cal Tech that graduated with honor as an aeronautical engineer, and they wouldn't even hire him. So I said, "Maybe we're on the wrong track." And then a, I had a Caucasian friend who said, who was out for wrestling and I sort of fumbled around in this, and he said, "You know, Yosh, you farm tomatoes?" And I said, "No." He says, "I think there's a lot of money in tomatoes." I said, "Oh yeah? How do you figure?" And he said, "Well, they do real well on hillside farming." So I said, "I don't know anything about hillside farming." "Well, I know an area that's in Whittier Heights," he says, "we could grow tomatoes." I said, "Okay, tell me about it." So we went to look at Whittier Heights, and this is, it's real, on the hillside, he says, "I can lease that, about two or three acres of it." "So how much do we have to pay?" He says it's cheap, and I said okay, so he, so it was no problem. "So how do we work this?" He says, "You know, Yosh, the tomatoes coming out of San Diego, Mexico ends about end of May. All the tomatoes are gone at end of May, coming in from Mexico." He says, "The San Diego," I think he said, "The San Diego tomatoes start about middle of, middle of June or first part of July. We have about a two to three week window, and if we can get the tomatoes out between, in that three weeks, we can make the money." I said, "That sounds interesting." So we went out and got some plants. Course, we had a lot of helpers, strawberry helpers, they worked, they lived on the ranch. And so I told my dad about it and he says, well, he didn't think it was a good idea, but if we wanted to, yeah. So I borrowed his workers and we went back in there and planted tomatoes. Well, we didn't know enough about tomatoes -- that is, I didn't know enough and this fellow (Jerry) Young didn't know enough about tomatoes. So it has to be done right, but we didn't know anything about hillside farming, and you're supposed to, to get tomatoes you're supposed to take some blossoms off. You can't let all the blossoms flower. So they flowered, and when the tomatoes came out they were very small tomatoes, so we couldn't sell them because it had to be fairly large. But they were small tomatoes, so we lost money on that thing. So this fellow, Young, says, "Well Yosh, I guess we better quit the farming and try something else." And I said, "I'm gonna go to USC, get my dentist, a dental degree," and start dentistry. I said, "What are you gonna do?" He says, "I don't know." Said, "Maybe I'll think about it, maybe I'll go, but I'm gonna go back to school." So that's how it ended in, I guess, 1939, 1940 or something like that.

TI: That was a pretty, I guess, entrepreneurial thing for you to do at a young age, to take this on.

YU: Well, there was, then, but it was something that I thought maybe we could do. But then I thought, after that I went back to the farm and I was picking strawberries, and in the morning I go out to pick the strawberries and the dew would be on there and there'd be, mosquitoes would fly out and they would sting me, and I was always sort of allergic to mosquitoes anyway, and it would give me a, start a big welt on my hands, face, and I said -- and about ten o'clock at, ten to 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, it would just get hot and the sun would beat on your back and everything -- and I said, "I got to find something to do." So my roommate, who lived about, about a mile away from me, and he was in a, his parents had a grocery store, and they said, "Yosh, why don't you think, why don't we get together and go to school?" I said, well, the only thing we knew at that time was UC Berkeley or UCLA, and I said, "Where do you want to go, UCLA or Berkeley?" He says, "No, I don't want to go to Berkeley." "Why not?" He said, "My brother goes to Berkeley, so I don't want to go there." Says, "UCLA, well, it's too close to home." I said, "Alright, where shall we go, then?" "Hey, there's a place called San Jose State Teacher's College." "I don't want to be no teacher." Says, "No, no, no. You don't have to take teaching. You can do whatever you want. They got different kind of courses." So we got a booklet, and they had just changed the name from San Jose State Teacher's College to San Jose State College, so we said, "Hey, let's go up there." And he says, "Yeah, they got a pretty good football team too." So I said, "That's real interesting. Let's go." Of course, we weren't, we weren't gonna play football, but we went and we came here, and I think I got accepted about two weeks before I came up here in September. And I had no, I had applied late and everything, but it didn't matter. I just had confidence that they'll accept me. [Laughs]

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.