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BN: Okay, so I wanted to also ask about, a little bit about what happens after the war and kind of how your parents and the families left camp, the respective camps they were in.

AU: Okay. Before the war was over, many Nisei were able to get permits to leave their camps to attend college, I think often with the help of organizations like the Quakers or different Christian groups. So that was also the case for both my parents. Mom's brothers, Dick and Bill, ended up at University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and eventually they brought over Mom. Mom went to Doane college and Grandma and Grandpa ended up also at Lincoln and the youngest in the family, Helen, they were all there. Dad was there and met Mom's brothers, and through them, he met Mom. And he immediately fell for my mother, who, as you know, is a very beautiful woman, and they ended up getting married. And I believe they were the first Japanese American couple to get married in Pasadena. I think it was an article in the Star-News, something to that effect. Now once the war was over, Mom's father, Grandpa Morita, who had had really a pretty successful grocery store business, he used to drive a truck and bring groceries to Japanese American families in the San Gabriel Valley. He lost that, and like many Issei, he had to turn to gardening, and gardened for many years until he retired. In Dad's case, the nursery had been under supervision of a Caucasian man, I don't remember his name, but I do know my dad said they're pretty sure he mismanaged the nursery, may have stolen some things. And so once they were out of camp, Grandpa, I think, basically turned the nursery business over to my dad who was the oldest son, and that's a tradition in Japanese families. Unfortunately, Dad was not a good businessman, and Star Nurseries never did that well again, not like before the camp years. It did last maybe (thirty) years, but like I said, it was a struggle. One of the things that occurred in our family that we talk about a lot is the fact that Grandpa had acquired property, not just in Montebello, but in Sierra Madre and in Manhattan Beach. The Manhattan Beach property, they kept selling in groups of acreage to various people and also to the Manhattan Beach Unified Schools (through eminent domain). And supposedly, they had to use that money to pay off bills or debts for the nursery. But what Grandpa had built up as far as the nursery and having all this landholdings just kind of disappeared.

[Interruption]

BN: Okay. As a follow up question, I wanted to get a sense of how well, or how much interaction did you have with your grandparents as you were growing up after the war?

AU: We had more frequent contact with my mother's family even though both families were nearby. What really helped as far as, from my generation's standpoint, is that her father spoke fluent English. So out of our four grandparents, he was the only one that really could communicate easily with us. And my parents never tried to have my sister and me learn Japanese, so we really weren't able to talk too much to the other three grandparents. But the families would get together pretty regularly on my mother's side, the Morita side. Less with the Uyematsus, but we saw them, too.

BN: So you were among the lucky Sansei who didn't have to go to Japanese school, it sounds like?

AU: I always thought I was unlucky because my folks were, you know, there's a spectrum in the Nisei of those that are more Americanized and less Americanized. They were way on the end of more Americanized, so they didn't really pass much on as far as customs, any kind of customs to us, very few.

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