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BN: Anyway, back to Denver, where physically were you located, and did it become kind of this Japanese area?

JB: Uh-huh. In Denver, the Japanese seemed to congregate on skid row. There were a lot of bars and pool halls and things like that. And first it started out maybe a Japanese grocery store and another Japanese grocery store, sort of like a one block area. Tosh Ando, the lawyer, was there, Manshu Grill was there, Furutas opened that. There was the pool hall next door, there were jewelry stores, Nonaka barber shop. So it was all sort of like in a one block area. Granada Fish was there, Pacific Mercantile, and then the Buddhist church came up. So people didn't live there, but the businesses were there. But we didn't live too far from the business, we were still sort of like in the downtown area, but there were a lot of Japanese who moved in East Denver or north, people that had houses. I was just talking to my brother, we lived in what they call Seicho-No-Ie, it's a Japanese movement, I'm not sure what it is.

BN: It's considered one of the new religions.

JB: So we lived upstairs in a one-room room. At that time, most of the people that were first moving into Denver usually stayed in one hotel room. My girlfriend, her brothers, mother and father, were all in one room, just like camp. And, oh, yeah. So several of us girls, we'd congregate in the hallways of these hotel rooms, and that's where we started calling ourselves the Rugged Lovers. And the Rugged Lovers was this group of girls that hung out together through junior high and high school. And we would practice dancing, go to the movies with boys, it was just a fun time. The uniform that we wore were men's maroon shirts, extra large, with a white pleated skirt that showed about that much skirt, so it was mostly all men's shirt. And then we wore a white bow on our hair, in the middle of our head. That was the Rugged Lovers.

BN: Where did the name come from?

JB: Well, do you remember Gillette? You don't remember Gillette. The Gillette commercials on boxing matches in those days was, "Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp," then the Gillette blue blades would come on. So we took that as our motto, "Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp," that was our motto, and then we had our outfits, and we were the Rugged Lovers.

BN: How many girls?

JB: There was about six or seven of us.

BN: And then you're how old?

JB: Now we're all in our nineties.

BN: At the time you started it.

JB: At the time we were thirteen.

BN: You were about thirteen when you left camp.

JB: Yeah, we left camp at thirteen, and so this is the area of, like, thirteen to about sixteen, seventeen. Junior high school and high school days.

BN: And then were these girls you met in Denver, so they're not people you knew in camp.

JB: In camp, no.

BN: So it's all people who had come from different places to Denver.

JB: Right. And they had dances on Thursday night at the Y, and we used to go to the dances as just girls, and the boys would be there. We'd go to those movie theaters as all girls and sit in the front row, and then the boys would sit in the second row right behind us, and that's how we watched movies in those days. [Laughs]

BN: Was there a boy's club that you were affiliated with?

JB: No. The group of guys... they were all, I don't know how you'd say it, really nice guys. Art Maeda, Art Tsuji, Mickey Takeshita who helped bring the Heart Mountain barrack back from Heart Mountain to L.A. Art Maeda became, he was a CPA or something like that. Anyway, all these young boys grew up to be very nice young men. But when we were all hanging out together, all we did was just dance or have fun, just hang out together.

BN: And then when you came to Denver, were you junior high or had you started high school?

JB: Junior high.

BN: You went to junior high and high school.

JB: Both, in Denver.

BN: Which schools?

JB: It was called Cole junior high and Manual Training High School. It's called Manual now, Manual Training. And that was sort of like the high school that was in the center of town, then you'd have East High School, West High School, South High School, North, but Manual was in the center which was mostly African Americans, Latinos and Japanese and some Caucasian. It was a mixture of people.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.