<Begin Segment 13>

VY: What was the Quaker school like, and how old were you when you were going there?

MM: It only has ninth through twelfth grade, and there's only five hundred students in the school. And during that time, they were bringing students from Europe who were displaced persons, and bringing them to school. And some of the teachers, like the German teacher, I'm sure she was a Jew from someplace in Europe, but she taught us German. Nicest lady, Frau Blaschke. And we had a lot of Quaker activists in the school, and we were really, they were appreciative of having somebody in the school that had these parents from different cultures, because that was important, especially after the Second World War, to the Quakers and all the work they did, and they did work camps in Europe, and they did work camps in Philadelphia. So we were involved in working with people who were needy in one way or another. Not educationally necessarily, sometimes, but all these people that were needy. And my mother was always helping people because one time I remember sitting at the table and I said, "Look at that lady. She's walking down the street with a great big DP on the back of her." (Mother) jumps out, dashes to see this woman. Who is she? She's a displaced person that the military has brought back. She was from Latvia, and she was taken out of a German concentration camp and brought over because the Americans had gone in and freed them, and so they brought them over. So, being German-speaking, she was able to talk to this lady in German. And the lady needed hearing aids, she got her hearing aids. Her husband was a machinist. She figured, well, he doesn't need so much direction. If he's shown how to do it, he can do it because he's a machinist, he's a practiced machinist. And her son was five years old, so she was able to get him into school. So she would help this lady and, you know, in twenty years they were property owners, college graduates. Because she was always helping somebody.

And in our house, we had all these people living there couldn't find someplace. Or even if they did find someplace, they still would find my parents to help out. Like there was this Japanese student at Princeton, he was going to fail. And Princeton knew that he was failing because his English wasn't good enough. So, guess what? He came and lived with our family for maybe six months while my mother gave him lessons every day. He took leave from Princeton and went back to Japan. And my parents would go see how he's doing, they were so proud of him, and he died, oh, maybe within five years of going back to Japan. Just a young man, after he got his doctorate at Princeton.

VY: So sad.

MM: Yeah, but, you know, my parents would keep in touch. Like Herbert Tokutomi, when he came out of the camps, took me there, my parents went to see him and his family in Newcastle, California, where while he was in camp, while they were in camp, the highway came in right through their property and right through their orchards. Now, the Americans who were back at home, they made a tunnel under the freeway so they could get their tractors from side... but since they were in camp, they didn't get a tunnel to go between their orchards and their land. And so they had to sell their land because there's no way to get to the orchards to maintain them. So that's just an example of the kind of thing, if you're not home, you're not there. But anyway, they loved meeting my parents because they had taken their son in and given him a home while he was in the East Coast. So they were very happy, and they had a very Japanese house with a soaking tub and everything. But they couldn't be farm owners anymore because of the way the road had come and divided up their land. So they had no access, they had to go way around in order to get to it instead of just going on to the freeway.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.