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BN: I wanted to ask you also about -- you had mentioned accompanying your father sometimes on his gardening routes, yeah, and your memories of that.

SH: Well, I was a young girl, and I don't know how that happened but I would get on his truck and go with him to his various, you know, to the various customers, his route of customers. And I would get out and be raking leaves, whatever, and my mother would pack a lunch for the both of us. And I did that for a (while). I think I was about eleven or twelve years old. So I knew something of what it was like to be a gardener then.

BN: What was his area that he worked in geographically?

SH: Well, you know the area... I think he had a lot of Jewish customers, you know, the Fairfax area; he had a hotel up in Highland, that area. But I don't think my father ever had a sense--I don't think he ever had a good head for business. My mother did, not him.

BN: How long did he remain a gardener?

SH: All his life, really.

BN: His entire postwar career, basically.

SH: Yes.

BN: Did you get a sense of who his customers were, or did you get to meet any of them?

SH: I met one woman who had taken a liking to him. She would come out with a tray full of, you know, coffee and sweets when we were there. I thought that most of his customers were middle-class Jews in the Fairfax area. And I'll leave it at that because then I'll get into some political statements that might not be politically correct.

BN: Okay. And then in the area you grew up in: where was that and what was the neighborhood like? I mean, were you . . . . Or . . . ?

SH: Well, after we moved out of that hotel with the railroad tracks in the back, we lived on Exposition Boulevard. And that was a -- sort of a deteriorating neighborhood. Although when I moved in, there was this --a Canadian woman -- who was extremely kind to me, who gave me an old watch and so on and so forth, and took me to Knotts Berry Farm. It was really a deteriorating neighborhood, and I went to Manual Arts High School, which, at the time, I think, was at least fifty percent if not more Black. And -- Oh, I have to tell you, when we lived in the hotel with the non-contiguous and then contiguous rooms, my sister Kimiko would not stay in school. She kept walking home. So my mother put her and myself to look after her in Maryknoll school. So I went to Maryknoll school for three and a half years, and that structure is still there in downtown Little Tokyo, surrounded by a whole bunch of ugly high rises in a gentrified neighborhood now, which, by the way, is only like ten minutes' walking distance of tents and the homeless. It's just, you know, extreme disparity within fifteen minutes. So I went to Catholic school for three and a half years, and I got a very good education. And when I went to Manual Arts, I can honestly say I practically learned nothing, you know. But I was very active in all the clubs. I learned how to run an organization, I learned how to work on a high school dance, you know, I learned how to do those kind of things. I didn't learn much academically. So that when I wound up at UCLA, I made the dean's list at the end of the first year, but I have to honestly say that I was sitting down in the library reading (a lot of political) philosophy, and I thought, "Well, we didn't read this in high school at all." And, in fact, my husband, who went to the Taft School, which is a very preppy school here in Connecticut -- we compare reading lists some days, and it's just really hilarious. He's sitting down reading George Orwell and here I am at the library looking at Sue Barton, Student Nurse. And I mean it's just really ridiculous. That library, by the way, is now the USC faculty center. And I have a friend who teaches there, and I've had lunch and I'm looking around thinking, "Well, didn't I used to run around here looking at looking . . . at novels?"

BN: So just to back up, the time you were at Maryknoll, were you living throughout at the hotel?

SH: No. We moved to that -- to an apartment.

BN: Right, okay.

SH: --near Exposition Park.

BN: So you're commuting to Maryknoll.

SH: We were commuting on a bus, yes. And I have to say that, you know, the Catholics do a great job of educating you. I mean it's totally unintended, I'm sure, but it's made me rabidly anti-clerical.

BN: I've heard that from a few people, actually. Now, your parents, you know, as we've mentioned, were kibei, and many gardeners also were kibei. Was that kind of a social circle, or did they go to Japanese -- ?

SH: My father was--he belonged to some organization, you know, bI don't remember; he'd go to dinner every once in a while, you know. But I don't recall much of that.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.