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BN: Many of the Japanese families who settled in Chicago or other cities eventually moved back to California. Was there any discussion in your family or consideration about doing that that you were aware of?

KS: No. I think, see, first of all, it had to do with a job. He didn't want to go into gardening, but after he retired, I think they considered themselves too old. So in those days, I think people in their sixties thought they were old. Now, people in their sixties think they're young, you've got to be in their eighties to be old, but them days, they thought they were too old to move. They didn't think seriously of moving out this way. Then my oldest daughter, she was married and she had a child and they lived in Chicago, so that would be sort of splitting the family.

[Interruption]

KS: Okay, so then there was our family, and then there was a family that was in Manzanar that came to Chicago, and that family had two boys and one girl. So it turned out that on my father's side, there was him and his one brother in Chicago, and then there was two brothers in L.A., so that split up the Tatsui clan.

BN: But he did have another relative, brother in Chicago.

KS: Yeah, his brother, he died in Chicago, and his brother, he lived on the south side. So you know, talk about north side and south side, so when we went there, we had to take the Elevated, then you had to transfer, then you had to, from the Elevated you had to take the streetcar. It was a big journey. My father, before the war, used to drive every day to the produce market in a state truck, and weekend drive a sedan. But once he went into camp -- he drove into camp, too -- once he drove into camp, he never drove again. I think he got old, and he somehow never drove again.

BN: Probably, as you say, he'd probably be in his sixties.

KS: Yeah. But I think just the idea, I think Issei had to be able to drive to survive in the 1920s and '30s. Issei could live in Chicago in the '40s and '50s and not drive and survive. That's how they got old.

BN: What about, how was it for you and your sister? Did you like Chicago better, did you want to go back to L.A., or was it not even something you thought about?

KS: Well, I thought I wanted to go to L.A. So then after I finished college, I went to New York, so I worked at a place called Sperry Gyroscope Company, and it was on Long Island. So I lived in Long Island, and there was a part of Queens that goes all the way out to Nassau County, so that's where I lived. And I lived with two guys that I went to college with, so these are two hakujin guys and myself, we rented this place in Long Island. And then they also worked at Sperry Gyroscope Company. And then I used to go to night school in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Poly, so then I used to take the bus, and then the E or F train to Queens, and then at Kew Gardens, transferring to the GG train, and then go down to Brooklyn, get off at the Hoyt–Schermerhorn, and then go to Brooklyn Poly. So I did that about a year, and then these two guys that I was living with now, I think they might have both returned to Chicago, they were from Chicago. So next I moved in with a house of me and four or five other guys that worked at Sperry Gyroscope Company. So we had, in this one neighborhood, there was this one house with four or five engineers. And if they would buy an engine for their motorboat, they would put it in a garbage can and try it out in the middle of the night. [Laughs] But I lived together with them for about half a year.

BN: And when you say after college, was this after your undergraduate?

KS: Right, after my undergraduate, yeah.

BN: So, yeah, let's go back to that. You graduated, then, from...

KS: I went to Illinois Institute of Technology.

BN: From high school.

KS: Yeah, I graduated from high school in Chicago, Waller High School.

BN: And you went straight, then, to IIT?

KS: Right.

BN: Were you the only of your siblings to go to college?

KS: Okay, my third sister, she went to a junior college over there, so there was a place called Wright junior college, and I was the only one to go to a regular four-year school.

BN: Did you, when you were in high school, know what you wanted to do at that point?

KS: Not really.

BN: So what drove you...

KS: Well, I thought engineering might be good, because my brother-in-law, the one that's married to my second sister, he went to engineering school in Michigan, University of Michigan, but he didn't graduate, but he was in the armed services in Japan. So his family, they were Jerome and also Rohwer also. And then his father was trying to talk my friends into going to Seabrook. My mother said that's going the wrong way, going away from California, so she didn't want to go to Seabrook. So that time, I guess that family went to Seabrook, and I think my father's best friend from Japan, I think they went to Cleveland. So everybody decided what to do.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.