<Begin Segment 17>

SF: Okay. I want to skip ahead a little bit and talk, or ask you a little bit about your educational experience as you were growing up and you moved to Beacon Hill, which was integrated so to speak, and how it's out of Nihonmachi and, what was, what was the school like for you?

FM: When I first started, I started at the Methodist Church kindergarten. And that was a place run by white teachers with a whole bunch of Nisei kids running around, in the main. But curiously as I remember, there were also some white kids who were present in the kindergarten, probably kids who were from the neighborhood families. I remember one, this was my first experience of ethnicity that I remember. I remember one occasion where a white girl was, I thought, mistreating one of my Japanese friends and I started to object to her. And I don't know what I said, but she made fun of my English or what I was trying to say and she said something to the effect of why don't you learn how to speak the English language or something, something like that. And suddenly it, I came to realize that, you know, I was not speaking the language as I was supposed to according to the Caucasian standard and I got the sense of ethnicity as I say in a fashion that I had never been aware of before. It's just a kind of incidental example. Coming back to the matter of school. But, but that was in fact not an uncommon experience that school was the place where kids, Japanese American kids of, of my generation first learned exposure to the English language, and many of the kids went there, as they say, without knowing any English ever and they just sit there, sit there dumbfounded listening to a white teacher babbling, teachers babbling at them in a fashion that they would not be able to understand. And on the other hand, in my case, because I had two older sisters, I had the sense that I knew enough English to follow what was going on when I went to first grade and had an American teacher.

The first grade I went to was at a place called Main Street School which is on the corner of 6th Avenue and Main Street. The building of Main Street, one part of the building of Main Street still, of that school, still exists on that corner. It's the school building entrance. Anyway, it was a school for the first three grades, first, second and third grade. And then, kids who advanced beyond that would go to one of the other schools. But the Main Street School for the first three grades was populated by virtually all Japanese kids, Japanese American kids. There may have been some Chinese kids and there must have been, but somehow they don't figure prominently in my recollection. And the teachers of course were all white. And the teacher I had in first grade was a lady named Ms. Smith. I have a very clear visual picture of her still. And I have a sense of learning how to fold paper and learning a little bit about how to use the English language and things like this that was entirely new to me. What impressed, what sticks most clearly in my mind, however, is the fact that this was a school populated by all Japanese American kids. In fact virtually all the Japanese Americans of my age or older probably had their first schooling in that school. So it became well known as the elementary school for Japanese American kids right in the heart of the Japanese community. The other thing I recall very distinctly was a lady named Ada Mahon, who was the principal of the school. She was a lady of Irish background, as I recall, extremely strict and demanding, and authoritarian actually, and she would make the kids toe their line. But, the Issei thought she was the best thing in the world for the Japanese kids. They honored her in appropriate fashion later, as I remember. But Mahon, Ms. Mahon ran the school with an iron fist and ran the kids with very strict discipline. But also was demanding of them that they perform at a high level, as much as they could. So she symbolized then what that school stood for.

The Main Street School closed in the early, late 1920s I imagine and then there was something called Bailey Gatzert School that was organized and established on 12th and Lane Street, right near the Beacon Hill bridge, and that's the school to which my wife Michi went as an elementary school student. So many of the, or most virtually all Japanese American kids who grew up at that time went to that school, the Bailey Gatzert School. And the students were all Japanese Americans or Chinese Americans and there was a very definite sense of ethnic belonging by virtue of the fact that you were part of that student body. We had as -- I didn't go to Bailey Gatzert -- but kids who went there and kids who went to Main Street School had no clear notion of what the schools for these white kids could be like. For me, the experience came early of learning what the white schools, kids' schools were like, because when I was in the second grade as I told you, my father had the idea that he wanted our family to get absorbed into the larger community as rapidly as possible and so... and since his business was thriving at that point around 1920 or 1919, he bought a home in, on Beacon Hill and we became one of three Japanese families that lived on Beacon Hill at that time. Having moved up there, I then was assigned to the second grade class in, at Beacon Hill School where all the students now were white in contrast to the Japanese American kids who had been my schoolmates at Main Street School. I have no clear recollection of how I adjusted. I think I was a little overawed initially, but very rapidly got drawn into the school's goings on and adapted, as I feel, fairly easily to the new situation.

SF: So you had a lot of fairly close white friends.

FM: Yes.

SF: And you hang out and all that.

FM: Yeah, the curious thing is that my first friend is, that I remember of that time, was a young kid named Herbert Arnold who lived two or three doors away from me. So I got to know him and I thought of him as my friend. But very soon I discovered that he was not a good athlete. He didn't have the kinds of interests which so many other kids had. He was kind of a loner as it turns out, a what do you call it, what's the word for this type -- wimp? [Laughs] Is that what that call it nowadays?

SF: Weenie?

FM: He must have been a bit of a wimp. Anyway, I discovered that he was not as interesting to me as other students whom I discovered, whom I encountered and so very shortly, he dropped off on the list of my friends, but he was my first friend. And as my friendships enlarged, it included particularly guys who were very good at baseball or, or very good at other sports activities and I became a bit of a show piece for them, because the claim was that as small as I was compared to the rest of these hakujin kids, I could take care of myself physically, in little combats with them, and the claim came to be that, "Well, Frank knows judo, so you better be careful." [Laughs] And they kind of you know, helped me get through the, the difficulties of being a juvenile in a society where I might not always be accepted by other kids.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.