<Begin Segment 19>

BN: Well, actually, I want to get, return to this. But before we go there, I wanted to go back to PCC and I'm interested in the Nisei clubs and stuff. Can you tell us a little more about that?

FS: Okay, you mean about the club?

BN: Yeah.

FS: Okay, the Stags. I was one of the early ones, part of it, because they were all my friends.

[Interruption]

BN: They were called the Stags?

FS: Right. And maybe rightly so, a lot of the guys were shy. I don't know how the name came about, but it seemed fitting because quite a few of the guys didn't get married or anything. I don't know... it might all be because they were a similar age in camp and a lot of those kinds of things.

BN: Was it a PCC thing, were these all students at PCC?

FS: Yes, it started primarily. It continued... the gentleman that founded it, I call him that. He's a year younger than I, and I knew him from way back. My mother was close to his mother. But he and Richard Toshima... Ko Yamaguchi and Richard Toshima founded the Stags, essentially. And we were all, we had a basketball team just one or two years, so we had a uniform before that. But then we had jackets that said "Stags" in script on the back. It was meant to be also a social club. It gave a lot of the guys courage to meet girls, because not all were outgoing if you will. So it was also an excuse to go collectively to a dance at Normandy or Boyle Heights to where they had all these Nisei dances. And you'd go together in a few cars and things like that. So it was a gang unlike the Yellow Brotherhood on the Crenshaw side. It was more a gang that, of nice boys. We had not... totally different from what you would think of as a gang, it was more a social club is what it was, and a lot of the interaction was with other girls' social clubs.

BN: So you didn't have any fighting or anything like that?

FS: No, no.

BN: Were there affiliated girls' clubs?

FS: Yeah, Pasadena had a few. Well, I'm sure Bryan could remember all of them, or maybe did enough research on it. But there were girls' clubs. I recall a couple of clubs that were older than myself, because there were other men's clubs that were older.

BN: And then were the clubs like, you're all about the same age, and then was there another version of the club of younger kids?

FS: Yeah, both ways, both ways. There were probably two, I call it layers, because you can't call it a generation or anything, it was just layers of club a little bit older. So ones that, I think, first came out of camp, might have had, maybe there were more clubs based on recreation and socializing. I mean, there were two major churches at that time, but still, I don't think that provided all the interaction between all the young people.

BN: And then was everybody Nisei? There were no non-Japanese?

FS: No, it was all Nisei, all Japanese American. Pasadena was pretty segregated, I think. Maybe, you think back in hindsight, could be both ways, too, because we kept our place, if you will. But I think it evolved naturally, where it took my kids' generation, it's totally different. No sensitivity to it. Like my boy's, my older boy's friends, they were part of the establishment of the high schools and things, they were the power players of their high school. We were nobody other than football players or fancy car.

BN: And then did you still keep in touch with these guys?

FS: Yeah, the Stags, because of the fellow Ko Yamaguchi that started it, he had a very successful import business and he made sure that there were reunions. He belongs to the West Covina country club, and he would have a yearly, where he would invite everybody there, things like that. So we're still in touch, but now that we're older, people are dying off. But I don't know if there will be any more because COVID kind of ended that. But we were even meeting once a month with a small group of regulars. We're very tight in different ways, we're all different, and different careers, whatever.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.