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BY: Okay. Let's talk about your siblings, so I know that you had an older brother, and so, again, if you could repeat his name, when he was born, and any other siblings you have.

SS: Sure. My older brother David was born on October 20, 1937. And his full name was David Kenichi Shikuma, and his mom was Mary, Mary Takii was her maiden name. And he grew up... well, so he was four years old when they got taken away to camp, and my uncle Heek and uncle Charlie told me that, yeah, he wasn't that genki, that healthy as a young child, and they thought he was going to die when they first got to Poston, because the sanitation was bad, the food was bad, the medical care was virtually nonexistent, and he got this bad diarrhea. They thought it was dysentery, maybe, and he just kept losing weight. Yeah, he was looking really sickly and we thought maybe we would lose them. So fortunately he did pull through. The only picture I've seen, actually of the family in camp, I saw one photo of his kindergarten class at Poston, so there's fifteen, twenty kids in what looks like a sandbox or play area with a few teachers. And, like, nobody's smiling. The kids aren't smiling, the teachers aren't smiling, so this is a kindergarten class at recess and nobody looks happy. So that really stuck with me. He graduated from Vale High School. Brogan was only like two hundred people, so they had a K through 8 school, like literally a little red schoolhouse with about fifteen kids from K through 8. And then once he graduated, you went to Vale, which was a larger town of about a thousand people and they had a high school, so he went to Vale High School and graduated. And then we moved to California and he might have gone to a junior college for a year or two, but he eventually went to UC Berkeley as did a lot of my cousins: cousin Victor, cousin Hubert, cousin Larry, and graduated there. And that was, like, in 1960 roughly. And the Vietnam War was just starting to appear on the horizon. And there wasn't a draft yet but they were talking about it. So he decided to enlist before he got drafted, so he enlisted in the navy and served for three years and then came back and got a job as a ceramics engineer in Southern Cal.

BY: Is he still alive?

SS: No, he passed away in a car accident ten years ago? Maybe about ten years ago.

BY: Okay, and so you're the middle child?

SS: No, I'm the youngest.

BY: Okay. And so you have a, talk about your sister, I think?

SS: Yeah so sister was, full name is Lois Shizue Shikuma. She went by Lois and hated the name for a good part of her life and then, I don't know, twenty, thirty years ago, decided that she'd get rid of Lois and she just goes by Shizue. So Shizue was born on July 29th of 1951, so she was a year and a half older than me. And it was sweltering hot that summer in Oregon, eastern Oregon. Mom was miserable being pregnant at the time, so she said, "I'm never having a kid in the middle of summer again," so I think that's why I was born in December. [Laughs] But yeah, she went to UCLA and got involved in Asian American Studies and Asian American movement stuff down there. She knew a lot of the original staff of Gidra. Gidra had just started up at that point, and there were programs like the EOP program to help disadvantaged youth get into college. And so the Asian caucus basically within that group were a lot of her friends. So she gave me a subscription to Gidra and started sending me material about, that she was getting from Asian American studies, so that's when I actually started learning about the camps.

BY: So it was from your sister?

SS: Yes.

BY: Okay.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.