<Begin Segment 11>

BN: So you mentioned that you moved to Montebello when you were twelve, thirteen?

DA: Twelve years old.

BN: So you pretty much went to middle school, junior high school and high school there, right?

DA: That's right.

BN: Yeah. So what schools were those?

DA: Montebello Junior and Montebello High.

BN: Okay. And then you'd mentioned it was largely, that there weren't too many Japanese Americans in your schools?

DA: Right. Going from East Los Angeles where I knew everybody in my neighborhood, pretty much, walk into anybody's home, and a lot of the neighbors were Nihonjin. Either that or Jewish or Hispanic. But yeah, a large portion was Japanese. So you go to Montebello and there's hardly any. I think I mentioned to you, out of my graduating class, there must have been about twenty of us out of a thousand. And then my sister's class was a little bit bigger, maybe she had about a hundred in her class, which was right behind mine. But still it was primarily an Armenian and Hispanic population there. Hard to find Japanese girls to date, actually. [Laughs]

BN: And the Boy Scouts weren't helping in that regard.

DA: No.

BN: Although they, buddies had sisters theoretically, but maybe not such a good idea.

DA: Not such a good idea. There was a few.

BN: So you were kind of almost living in these two worlds in some respect?

DA: Oh, yeah.

BN: Because you're doing all this Boy Scout stuff in a pretty much all Japanese context, and the high school world is totally not.

DA: Totally not. Yeah, so that was how I kind of grew up. Plus, because of the move, losing a lot of friends from elementary school, I had to find new ones, make new ones. Actually, one of the people I knew from East Los Angeles that made that same move was the Miyatake family. So Gary and I were the same age, so at least we had each other for a while, and that's where Gary and I joined the Montebello golf team, so that's where I kind of got my hankering for golf, joining the golf team.

BN: This is when you were in high school?

DA: High school, yeah. I kind of lost my train... where were we now? We were talking about... oh, the groups, that's right. So sports also became a large part of my life as well. So I always wanted to have sixth period PE in junior high, so in order to do that, you had to be on some kind team. So I started going out for different kind of sports. So growing up, I had school friends that hang out during school, and then after school it was mostly my sporting friends or guys that played basketball or swam or golf or I did a little track. I tried everything, actually, baseball. And then, yeah, on the weekends we were the Boy Scouts, pretty much, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was church, which is generally Boy Scouts, somewhere around there.

BN: And then given all the Boy Scout commitments, were you able to play in the JA basketball leagues or anything like that?

DA: Well, not much.

BN: Because of all the Boy Scouts stuff.

DA: I do remember CYC being in baseball for a little while, and basketball, but that's when I was, before Boy Scouts. I think once Boy Scouts started, all that stuff is just too much.

BN: And then given your family interests, did you ever do judo?

DA: No martial arts. Though I know we all wanted to. But I think just given, just thinking back on it, all the things that my mom had us into, that was just too much. We were already taking some kind of music lessons, right? And then once this whole Boy Scout thing started going, she had three boys that she was hauling all over the place, and one more place just would have, wasn't going to work.

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