<Begin Segment 9>

BN: I was going to ask whether that had an influence on your own interest in music.

DA: I think... I don't know if that was, well, part of it was, I'm sure, that. And I know my parents, or at least my mom, was interested in having all her kids know or play music or get into some kind of arts. And so for me it was trumpet and trombone, for my sister it was piano, and then my two brothers, I think my mom tried to get them to do things, but I think they just kind of shined it on.

BN: Did you choose which instruments to play or did your mom choose for you?

DA: I think my mom kind of chose. Well, she chose, told me things I couldn't play, like drums. She didn't want me playing drums in the house. So there weren't too many things off limits other than that. We didn't have a piano at the time, so I think the trombone, trumpet came up because somebody just had it in their garage and it wasn't being used, and oh by the way, somebody else's son is going to be learning how to play it as well. So I think that's kind of how it happened. I wanted to play trumpet first, but I started getting braces, and that just did it. So I went to a trombone instead. Though I wouldn't have minded learning saxophone, but I guess at the time, nobody had one. Somebody had a trombone so that's what happened. And I actually got into it, at least music-wise. I liked playing music, and was part of the junior high and high school marching bands. And I actually thought about joining the UCLA, when I got into UCLA, I was actually thinking about trying out for the UCLA band until I found out that their practices were at seven in the morning. [Laughs] I'm going, I don't think so. Seven in the morning's a little bit too early.

BN: And then along those lines you had also mentioned being part of the Koyasan troop and the drum and bugle corps. Was that also, did that come first or was that...

DA: Actually that kind of came after.

BN: You were already sort of playing?

DA: I was already playing the trombone. This is, actually, I started in elementary school. And then so Boy Scouts was until I was thirteen, fourteen, and that's when I joined Koyasan's Boy Scout troop. And then as part of that, they had a drum and bugle corps.

BN: Your family were members of Koyasan all along, right?

DA: That's right. So though I find out, I thought you had to be a member of Koyasan to be a member of this troop, but that wasn't true. I got to meet kids from all over the city, which was, proved to be instrumental later on, just knowing kids from different parts of the city. So that's how the troop got to be pretty large at that, during those years during the '60s. I think at its highest, we must have had over eighty kids. And each patrol had at least ten guys in it, and we had eight patrols. Mine was out in Monterey Park, Montebello, we had one out in East Los Angeles, the west side. I don't think we had one in Gardena.

BN: Were all the boys Sansei, basically?

DA: Yeah, pretty much. And yeah, it was a big commitment. Because Friday nights were troop meetings and Saturdays was patrol meetings and then drum and bugle corps at least had a couple practices a week. And then when there was competitions, they added a third and sometimes fourth practice. So that's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, a lot of times. My mom, she managed to keep up with this. But yeah, so that was a big part of my social life in some ways during junior high and high school was this Boy Scouts.

BN: How many years were you part of the troop?

DA: Probably six years, from twelve to eighteen.

BN: All the way through high school, basically.

DA: Right. Yeah, right through high school. Stopped when I went to college. But I never became the troop leader or the scoutmaster, never wanted that.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.