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DS: And so within eight or nine months, my mother applied for and received admission to public housing, (Parklawn, a WPA housing project, located) on the outskirts of Milwaukee. And the public housing provided a rent subsidy, so it was only a few dollars a month. And we moved into public housing in 1945 and that was just before the end of the war, I attended fourth grade at Pleasant View (Grade School) which was within walking distance. And Pleasant View was the fifth school I had attended from the time I attended kindergarten in Eatonville, Washington, to the time we moved into Park Lawn, I had gone to five different schools. And as a result, I have no childhood friends from school because we kept moving from school to school. But Park Lawn (Public Housing) was like Nirvana. It was the showpiece of Mayor Frank Zeidler who is, as I mentioned the last socialist mayor of the United States. And it was his showpiece of what public housing can be and how human it can be. It was a wonderful place to live. The units were clean, well-managed, there were parks, baseball diamonds, ice skating in the wintertime, a community center for games for the kids. It was a marvelous change from the desert in Minidoka.

VY: I'm curious do you remember -- excuse me, I'm sorry. Do you remember any other residents there in the public housing?

DS: Public housing is public housing, and there were people of all economic socioeconomic levels. There was a family that lived at the end of our unit, and there were some really tough boys. And I won't mention their names, but I do remember that they belonged to a gang that terrorized us as children. There was a Halloween trick-or-treat event in the housing project. My mother loved to sew, so she sewed my brother Jerry a Felix the Cat costume with a long tail. And sure enough, one of the tough boys from the building came and destroyed the costume, pulled off his tail, leaving my brother to go home crying. We surmised that most if not all the boys in that unit ended up in some kind of maximum security facility in Wisconsin. But there were others that managed to get a foothold and to move up the socioeconomic ladder, which we did. We lived in public housing for almost four years before we could begin to, for my father to buy his first house. So the economic impact of the internment was extraordinary. It was severe. We left Eatonville with suitcases, we arrived in Minidoka with suitcases, we arrived in Black Earth, Madison, with suitcases, and we ended up in Milwaukee with suitcases. We had no equity, we had no savings. We were essentially at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. We went to public health nurses, we went to the Marquette University Dental School for free dental work. It was a time of freedom, but we didn't have a lot. So my father came home from the army, and within the year, my brother Bruce was born in 1947. And we lived in public housing for at least three or four, five years, until the 1950s when my father had saved enough money barely to buy his first house. So after being married from 1932 to 1952, almost twenty years, they had saved enough money to make a sixteen hundred dollar down payment on a house, which I had to supplement it with my paper route money. So you think about the economic deprivation, economic impact, arriving with nothing, with no home equity, no savings, we had to be very... my mother was very, very frugal. But when you talk with my brothers and my memory, we didn't feel deprived or poor, we felt like we were a family. And my mother was a great cook. She cooked tempura that was outstanding. So we didn't feel poor, and we began to move up the socioeconomic ladder.

VY: You know, if you don't mind, I'd like to go back a little bit more to the public housing. I'm interested in what that was like, like if you remember more about your, the other tenants there? Were there any other Asian families?

DS: Well, that's a great question. Because I think in the entire population of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, there may be less than a dozen Asians there. There may be Chinese, but very few Japanese Americans. I do remember one family that lived outside of the housing project, but I don't remember any families of color in the projects. This was before the mass migration from the south to the industrial north. It was like a city in Germany where German was the most predominant language. Breweries were the major industry, they're even still there in Milwaukee, heavy industry. And so even in my elementary class in school, we were the only Asians. But I don't ever feel a sense of antagonism, prejudice. We were just ourselves. And that gets to what I think might have been a great stroke of luck for us. That I think deep down in the heart of the German community, there was a sense of concern, because the enemy was German, and that we sort of looked like the enemy on the other side, but we weren't. But also there was a culture that had grown up that was part of the German socialist culture of acceptance, of providing for others, of community support. And one of my favorite memories of Pleasant View (Grade) School, the fourth and fifth grade, was of my elementary school teacher, we had one class, one teacher situation at Pleasant View. But for music, we had to listen to Richard Wagner's Ring Series. (The Ring Cycle) that was our music appreciation class at fourth grade. And I think that emphasis on music has stayed with me all my life.

VY: Wow. Do you have a sense of... so it sounds like in the public housing, it was mostly other predominately low-income, German heritage, maybe some others, I'm not sure. Do you have a sense of what generation? Like did you hear people speaking German in the public housing?

DS: No, I don't, but there was a sense of community, a sense of taking care of your community. And Wisconsin is the dairy state, and in order to save money, we would buy not quarts of milk or half gallons, we would buy gallons of milk. And there would be milk depots that could be reached by taking a bus. In order to save money, we would go next door and ask to borrow their bus pass. And we would get on the bus with our empty milk jugs, go to the creamery, buy two gallons of milk, use our bus pass, and come back to the housing project with our gallons of milk. I think that's an example of sharing between the neighbors, and it was a sense of sharing especially shortly after the war.

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