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PW: So what year was this, then, that they returned to California?

PY: 1951.

PW: 1951. Did they go straight to Los Angeles?

PY: They came back straight to Los Angeles. And I realized that I'd never asked my parents, where did you live in the several months before you bought the house in Van Nuys? But I'm going to jump to buying the house in Van Nuys because that in itself is... my dad was at the School of Medicine at UCLA, which was still in a very embryonic state in the early '50s. And he wasn't, at that point, he was thinking more in terms of an academic and research career and not as a practicing clinician and pediatrician. But a colleague at UCLA said, "I have this house in Van Nuys, and you're looking for a place. Wouldn't you like to buy it?" And my dad said, "Yeah." It's a price that he can afford. And then his colleague came back and says, "People on the streets say they don't want you." My dad being my dad was really pissed off, and he says, he put his uniform on, and he literally knocked on every door on the block and says, "I'm the guy who's going to buy that house. Do you have an issue with that?" Nobody would cop to it, and so he never really liked being there, for understandable reasons. My mother got really attached to the house and the neighborhood and all that kind of stuff. And so he really never got attached to that, plus he was really busy.

PW: It sounds like, so he landed and immediately worked at UCLA and they got the house. So he's commuting to work in Westwood?

PY: Right. Driving over Benedict Canyon, there was no 405 in those days.

PW: Did both of your parents work at that time?

PY: No. My mother was a housewife and she also did not drive. And so to be in the suburbs of Los Angeles, she suffered a terrible traffic accident in the '30s where she was really severely injured and traumatized by it. She didn't actually get a driver's license until mid to late '50s. So we were always dependent when we wanted to go into town to see the dentist or anything like that. One of our neighbors was a chef on La Cienega and so he would drive us there and take a cab to where we needed to go.

[Interruption]

PW: So we're at the home in Van Nuys now, and I was curious if you could describe that house and what the neighborhood was like.

PY: So 1951 just kind of, like, was a tract house. And it was actually the only, there was only, there was only two blocks developed at that time. And so we could walk to the corner, and it was all agriculture. We could watch crop dusters.

PW: What were you growing out there?

PY: Corn, asparagus, wild asparagus like... so 1950s Los Angeles, back yard still had incinerators. And so in the San Fernando Valley, like in your specific block, maybe Tuesdays was your day. So there was always a pall of smoke because in different neighborhoods, that would be your day to burn. So this had all been agricultural land in the very recent past. And so if you walked out, there's a little door into these undeveloped fields. I believe a Chinese family had owned and farmed those lands. But the asparagus patches, those asparagus would come up every spring, and all the neighborhood ladies would go out there and harvest these now wild asparagus. So it was just an up the street, two blocks, there were people keeping horses and that thing. So it was still very kind of rural, undeveloped, and it was just the very beginning of that whole, that part of the valley because it was suburbanized.

PW: And what was the general makeup of the neighborhood ethnically? Working people are there?

PY: It was a combination of white, some Latinos, no African Americans, no other Asian Americans. The schools I went to reflected that same mix. So Van Nuys at that point was industrial working-class. The Chicanos on the family were kind of, like us, the first Latinos and pretty much, kind of a white working class. Fathers were working at, there was a GM plant, there was a Budweiser plant, there was Lockheed. And so kind of industrial elites, I would assume most of them were in unions at that point. But culturally conservative, nobody would cop to it, but kind of, elements certainly racially hostile. And so a few people that my dad was comfortable with on the neighborhood were Chicanos. They were kind of groundbreaking. But I think my dad was the only one that we would call a professional doctor and just everybody else had factory jobs. One of our neighbors was the first Chicano salespeople for Sears acquisitions, he was doing some sort of acquisitions for industrial parks or something like that.

PW: Both their parents came back to Los Angeles in the postwar?

PY: Correct.

PW: Was your mother's family back in Boyle Heights or did they go somewhere else?

PY: No, they moved out to, like, about Twenty-Seventh and Hoover before the war. So that's why my mom went to Manual Arts instead of going to Roosevelt. And they moved back to the same neighborhood. I don't know if they moved back to the same house, but there around that Twenty-Seventh and Hoover, as I said, was a big house and they had boarders.

PW: And what about your father's family?

PY: They moved back to Normandie and Olympic just to St. Mary's. And so for the first fifty years of St. Mary's, it only had Yamazaki. So my uncle John was the assistant rector, and the rectory was large, and so he had, John and his family had part of it and my grandfather and grandmother and my aunt Louise had the other part.

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