<Begin Segment 11>

PW: So all three of you kids were all at school roughly around the same time, right? The youngest was much younger.

PY: Yeah, ten years.

PW: But you and Kathy were...

PY: Yeah, so she was three years younger, so we were in the same school. And then the next junior high school, we were the last six year school in the Los Angeles School District, Birmingham, it was an old military hospital. And so for five years, it was like seven through twelve, which was unusual. The L.A. school district at that time, I think we were the last ones that had that. Ninth grade we went to a separate, one year separate thing. So I spent five years at that school. And for a seventh grader, the twelfth graders seemed like another universe.

PW: And you described the racial makeup was similar to the neighborhood?

PY: Yeah, what changed it at Birmingham was that included a wider geographical. So as a six-year school, I think the student population was about four thousand. So it encompassed not just Van Nuys, but also Encino, and so that changed the class composition as well as the racial. So the neighborhood itself was predominately white working class. Encino introduces upper middle class professional and highly Jewish, and pretty well-established. So, like, the student parking lot, they just had a lot of late model Thunderbirds and Mustangs, and even one fucking XKE, pardon the language. As a kind of young adolescent Southern California male, most of us were car obsessed. I can still see a tail light of a 1962 Falcon and say, "That's a 1962 Falcon." I couldn't identify a recent car, but I still kind of get excited when I see a 1959 Chevy Bel Air.

PW: And what kind of kid were you at that time? Like you're between, let's say, junior high school and high school?

PY: You wanted to be accepted. I was feeling uncomfortable, like, "What are you?" question that we all got. Kind of like, "What are you?" The intonation of that one question and how, who was asking, how they kind of said that set off different degrees of uncomfortability, but it was always uncomfortable. But just in my standard response, "Well, I'm a fucking American." And so, like, some people would kind of query you more on that stuff. As I got a little bit older, just in junior high school, it wasn't infrequent to have a fight on December 7th. And I was really terrible at stuff and do this... it wasn't really a close friend, but this guy named Howard Swerlof, he was really very bad at this shit, you know it's coming. So he was kind of a tough guy, he gave me this... "You need something that will help you." So he gave me this sawed off baseball bat that his brother had kind of countersunk a lead weight into. So it had a little bit of heft, so it was about twelve inches. And so I used that one time, and then I guess I got lucky, hit the kid on the head, and that was the end of it. I never, that was the end of the Pearl Harbor fights.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.