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PW: So you didn't stay, though, in the strawberry industry, what did you do?

LS: Well, I had to do something, so I tried a couple of corporations and I didn't like their, I just didn't like working for them. It was just a cutthroat type of business. So after four or five years, for some reason, I got the bug that the travel industry seemed to be a pretty happy place. Everybody was going on vacation or having a good time, wanting to spend their money, so I talked to an agency and I said, "I'm interested in opening one, what can I do?" So this fellow kind of walked me through the business and helped me open up. And in 1970, I opened our travel agency in San Jose. It was good 'til about, maybe late '70s, and then deregulation of big industry came in, the banks were deregulating the trucking industry, airline industry, everything America's businesses kind of went downhill. And airline industry really, we had the best airline system in the world, now we rank below many countries, it just became dog-eat-dog. Maintenance was terrible because every company is now after dollars, they didn't care, just a whole banking, you know how many troubles the banking industry has had. And trucking companies, deregulation, I think, ruined. So there's no more mom and pop industries, which was the backbone of the United States coming out of the depression. People were doing something with our hands without a lot of capital, without having to earn a hundred thousand dollars a year to live. And now you have to earn a quarter million dollars if you're going to live in this area. Things have changed.

PW: Who was your audience for your travel, for your travel agency company, did you target a specific audience?

LS: Fortunately, I was able to procure a contract with IBM for some, mostly the research division, and that helped a lot getting us going. And I think it was ethnic minority small business, the IBM trying to help the local community, and it didn't hurt that I was only one block from the entrance to the main IBM plant. And then basically, outside of that, I didn't have very many business accounts, but I had a lot of personal vacation, families, and they would buy their trips from us.

PW: I imagine in the '70s, people in the Santa Clara Valley are starting to get wealth, and they can take trips and do that sort of thing. Is this when you started getting very involved with the veteran reunions?

LS: Well, we have maintained what we call the Annual Nisei Veterans Reunion in Las Vegas. Starting about 1953, which was the tenth anniversary of the 442nd. The big reunion, (50th) regimental reunion, was in Hawaii, and a lot of us went. And we marched down Kalakaua Avenue, it was a big affair. But it got a little unwieldy. They said we will do this every five years, but it became harder and harder to find host groups. L.A. did it once, most of it has been Honolulu. In the meantime, we would have company get-togethers, like E Company, we would get two hundred or more people coming to our company reunions. We'd go all over Hawaii, had it in Los Angeles, Northern California, we had it in Seattle. I took one group to Denver, took one group to Washington, D.C., when they opened the Smithsonian exhibit, that was a nice trip. And the numbers kept falling. The guys were dying off, and a lot of 'em were just going from here to Seattle or here to, you know, that trip became too much to do. So the L.A. group was the largest, so that group began checking out the hotels in downtown Las Vegas, that's the north end, the original strip. And they have like Four Queens, and a little older hotel and casinos, and they contracted to move in and have a three- or four-day get together. So the L.A. group, because the leader worked in the produce market, they would bring carloads of fresh produce, and bring it up to the hotel, and there's no refrigeration, we could have it stacked in the hallway, it'd be rotting away and making a mess. And they would require all the ladies to bring their cooking utensils, their cooking appliances, Japanese food, they start cooking, and sometimes they'd blow out the fuses, they'd have so much going on. [Laughs] So they caught hell about cooking in the hotel. So that eventually had to come to an end. So I'm not sure what the year was, we were attending with the E Company group. Finally the L.A. group said, "It's just not worthwhile doing any more, and the hotels don't want us to do this anymore, so we're going to give it up." I said, "Well, we're not going to give it up. Northern California, we'll take over. But we're not going to do any cooking, we're just going to have a reunion." We'll have drinks, and we'll have light pupus, nuts, chips, whatever, but no food cooking. They used to cook big meals. So that started what we took over as the Nisei Veterans Reunion.

And by this time, we had moved in to the California Hotel, and if you're familiar with that, that's basically a Hawaiian hotel. The family that owned it, I think started, maybe it was the Plaza Hotel, the first casino in Las Vegas, and he gradually opened one or two others and then he opened this California Hotel. And his background was picking the pockets of the plantation workers. Every payday, he would have a truck going to the plantations, or liquor and food, he would just practically take almost all of their paychecks. And he made his money off the backs of these plantation workers, that's Sam Boyd, B-O-Y-D, Sam Boyd Gaming, that's how he got his start in Las Vegas. So he kept his connection with Hawaii. Now, there's a daily flight from Hawaii to Las Vegas coming to gamble. Hawaiian people say it's cheaper to have our party in Las Vegas than in Honolulu. They have their birthday parties, their anniversaries, high school reunions, whatever. Almost everything is done at the California Hotel. And the atmosphere, they have Hawaiian restaurants, the dealers wear Hawaiian shirts. And a big sign, "Aloha spoken here." They used a lot of Hawaiian terms.

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