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LT: So your mother was raising four sons, she had two jobs, she was working the stock market, what do you recall about her at that time?

GI: Well, us sons went as wild as we possibly could. So she really didn't have much say in anything that we did except for what we ate. And should I tell the story about how I almost burned the house down?

LT: Sure.

GI: Okay. So when I turned thirteen, we were there for about a year and a half, and I had just started learning how to surf. I would get this twenty-five dollar surfboard and I would hitchhike and I would go down to Huntington Beach. And I rode my first wave on my first day and I thought it was really great. So I kept it up, and it was six months before I had another stand up ride, but I was hooked. So I came home and I was home from another hard day of surfing. And being the tough guy that I was, because I guess if your father was... boy, you wanted to be a tough guy. So I would always smoke a cigarette in bed before going to sleep. Well, this time I dropped a cigarette and started the mattress smoldering. And Mother came out and she yelled at me, and I said, "Yeah, yeah, old lady, whatever." Like I put some water on it and it's over. But then it happened again the next night. And then it clicked in my mind that, hey, I could have burned the house down and thrown our mom and our whole family out on the street. And it wasn't until maybe just a few years ago that I realized how much how much we Itanos or our kind of family or something is driven by this bushido samurai ethic of duty and honor. And at thirteen, I think it clicked in my mind that I was being very dishonorable and undutiful to allow the risk of this sort of thing happening.

So for some reason it just clicked in my head that I have to discipline myself, as my father might have, to prevent this sort of thing from ever occurring again. So in my little thirteen-year-old adolescent mind, I decided that, okay, I'll just deny myself my favorite thing, which is making friends. So at that point, I just made the decision to, okay, that's going to be my control. And then I'm going to do everything I possibly could to help our mom out from her drudgery. So I became the housekeeper and the butler and the groundskeeper and the plumber and the painter, and all these chores, whatever they were. And my surfer friends, when they came over, I remember one of them would drop his cigarette ash on the floor, and I would yell at him, "What are you doing? That's what ashtrays are for." And they would joke and say, "Gary, you'd make a great housewife," right? But my mom was very appreciative of that. But the thing, it's part of the trauma of poverty. Because you go through these things, and they're not explained, and you don't understand them for decades later. I mean, I'm just now starting to figure it out. And so what I figured out is the reasons I have no friends now is because I just, ever since that time, I just put my head down and just have been doing the right thing. Whatever was the right thing to do, and do your best, and nothing else mattered. So that's been kind of my life. But it served me well professionally and that sort of thing, and in my activist life. And it's hard to regret something that you really don't have any control over.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.