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BN: Okay, so let's get started. It's March 22, right? 2023, and we're in Mililani, Hawaii, interviewing Jeff Furumura. I'm Brian Niiya, I'm doing the interviewing. George Russell is our videographer, and I'm sorry...

GR: Tracy.

BN: Assisted by Tracy, his wife. And we're going to go ahead and get started. So as we talked about in our pre-interview, we'd like to start with your parents. So I wondered if you could just tell us a little bit about your parents, maybe starting on your dad's side.

JF: Okay. Let's see. My dad was born in 1916 on February 29th. He's a leap year baby. And he grew up in Boyle Heights, had friends by the name of, I think, Jack Webb, Anthony Quinn, people in the Boyle Heights area. And then let's see. He had an older brother, Togo, and then he came along, and then he had two younger sisters, Nellie and Rose, and the baby of the family was Eddie. And Eddie and my dad got along famously, and they would always be together on the weekends. My dad was good at making kites. So he would make kites for Eddie, and the two of them would go down to this open area at the base of, I think it's Bunker Hill, whatever it's called. And they were flying kites there one Saturday morning when a car lost its brakes and jumped the curb and struck Eddie, and he was killed instantly. And that really shook my dad. They were seven years apart, so my dad was twelve and Eddie was just five. So he saw it all happen, and I think that really impacted my father. He used to say things that didn't make sense to me, but now they do, now that I understand some of that family history, he used to say things like, "Books make good friends." He used to brag about hanging out in the public library nearby, that's the main branch of the public library. He would hang out there all the time, and he would say, yeah, "Books make good friends." He was trying to encourage me to become a reader like he was, but I think a lot of his success later in life can be attributed to his love of books. But I think what drove him into that library was just trying to lose himself from that memory of seeing my, his younger brother killed in that fashion. Anyway...

BN: Sad, very sad story.

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