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BY: So let's talk a little bit about your childhood. So you grew up in Watsonville. Can you talk a little bit about your house, your neighborhood?

SS: So we moved to Watsonville when I was two, and so I don't have real clear memories of it. And our first house was a little yellow house on a street called Tuttle Avenue or Tuttle Street. And it was in town, and it was really small and cramped. And actually, my clearest memory of it when we were moving out. I remember this one wool blanket sitting on a box by the door while everything was being moved out. And then we moved to Cutter Drive, which was about two, two and a half miles outside of town on... Cutter Drive was a dead-end street, and it branched so there was a lower Cutter and upper Cutter, and we lived right just before the branch where it split. And it was largely white, there were maybe one or two Chicano or Mexicano families. And later on there were other Japanese families that moved in on upper Cutter, but I think we might have been the first Japanese family on that street. Our neighbors that we were really good friends with were the Selak's who were Slavonian, I think they were from the Dalmatian Coast originally.

BY: So who were your friends growing up?

SS: Growing up, my friends were largely my relatives. Had a bunch of cousins and other people from church, because we would go to Sunday school every Sunday and then we would have church picnics and we'd have family dinners. So that people I would see would be all my relatives because we were all in the Westview Presbyterian Church, and then all the church kids.

BY: So most of your friends, or almost all of them, were Japanese American then?

SS: Yeah, until I got into elementary school, and then I started making friends there.

BY: Okay, so we'll talk about school in a minute, but what things do you remember doing as a child other than going to school?

SS: Well, when I was really young, I remember going with... there wasn't a daycare or childcare, so whenever my mom went to work on the farm and the packing shed, usually then she would take us along, and before we were old enough to help with anything, we would just be running around the packing shed doing things. So we would build little forts from boxes of crates for the berries, and so we would stack them up and build little forts inside, or we would go running around outside looking for bugs. I remember I snuck into a truck once, and in the glove department I found two packs of cigarettes. So I pulled them out and I started unraveling it, and all this brown stuff started crumbling down. So it was really fascinating, so I did that with every single cigarette in the pack.

BY: So I know that you spent a lot of time at the church and in church related activities. How connected was your family to the Japanese American community outside of church?

SS: Well, like I said, Dad was member of JACL, so that was more of a, all people in the Japanese American community. But it was a definite divide between the Christian Japanese and the Buddhist Japanese in town. Like my folks didn't like me going to much, so we never went to Obon in Watsonville, because that was a Buddhist thing. And even though there was a Japanese language school at the Buddhist Temple, when they did send us to Japanese language school, it was at the Christian church in Salinas, which was like a thirty-five minute drive away from where we lived. So there was that kind of divide, so I really didn't have any Buddhist friends until I got to high school.

BY: Interesting, that's very interesting. Okay, did you have any Asian American role models when you were growing up? And if so, who were they?

SS: I woul say I did have any. I mean, there were some leaders in the community that I knew, but I didn't really know of any Asian Americans outside of the community. At that point, there weren't any even newscasters.

BY: All right.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.