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PW: Where did you go to school, elementary school?

HS: Grammar school was on O'Farrell Street, that was two blocks, one beyond Geary Street. I don't know if the Japanese were the majority, but there were mostly Japanese, one or two blacks, and the rest were Jewish children. The black child was one of my best friends, his name was Jeffrey. And I brought him home all the time, and my sisters and brothers, they were quite tolerant, and they were very good. And so they would always smile when Jeffrey would come.

PW: What did you do for fun? Like what were your favorite things to do?

HS: For fun? Well, because I was the youngest, I got to go to camp, join YMCA, join Boy Scouts, I went to Japanese language school, camps, YMCA camp, and poor, my brother just above me, (Katsu), was always ignored. So I'm sure he felt badly about it, because he wouldn't come back to San Francisco. He became a dental technician, he was very good with his hands. And he married a Seattle girl and so he went to live in Seattle and started his own dental technician practice, and he always took one apprentice. I went to Lowell High School. Lowell High School was supposed to be the academic school. Unfortunately, most of the teachers were about retirement age, and they (didn't work) hard, and they really didn't put up... (though) the young teachers were great, like Ms. Reskan in French. Ms. Diflora... Italian in math, and George Lornear in social sciences, they were really very good.

PW: Did you have really good friends in high school?

HS: Good friends?

PW: Yeah, did you have really close friends in high school?

HS: It was a Japanese community, Lowell High School had a fairly large number of Japanese kids, so we were always together, the Jewish kids were always together, and I didn't know very many whites. The only white kids that I knew were Jews. Well, Lowell High School was really good. Alexander Calder, the sculptor, artist, Breyer, who was now Associate Justice, (Supreme Court), was two years behind me, I think. His brother is U.S. Attorney, and there were two Nobel laureates. It was not a tough school, we made sure we never brought books home. Today, it's entirely different, everybody studies. They were the first school in San Francisco, as far as I know, to start Advanced Placement. There weren't very many schools teaching, so four of us were put in a pre-calculus course. I don't know the name, I forgot the names of two white boys, and Ken Yoshimura was the other. But he, interesting enough, he went to Armstrong and he worked for Lockheed, and he worked in the skunkworks and that apparently a secret work camp. He wouldn't tell me too much about it.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.