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BN: And then they were at the laundry, and then at some point, I'm guessing, they moved out.

JF: Yeah. Once my grandfather became himself too ill to run it, my mom wasn't going to be doing that by herself. So they sold the business, I'm not sure what they got for that either. But the only recollection I have after that was moving into our Orchard Avenue apartments. It's at the corner of Twenty-eighth and Orchard, close to the USC campus. The low-rise stucco apartments are still there. It was a complex of maybe eighteen, I think, maybe twenty, very small units. And our family of four lived in an upstairs, two-bedroom unit, and it was owned by my mom's parents, so my grandparents on my mother's side. If I take a couple steps back to trace their steps there, when Nori leased that ten-room walkup, they parleyed the proceeds they were able to save from that to a forty-five unit, I think my mother called it, on Oakenwald Avenue. It's a really big complex.

BN: Is this in Chicago?

JF: Yes, still in Chicago. And they gifted the ten-room walkup to my mom and Dad, and that's where my dad found out through the worst way possible that he was allergic to coal dust. Because he had, one of his responsibilities was shoveling the coal into the furnace in the basement, and the coal dust made him break out in these boils that were, ugh, pus-ey and leaking. He said that, coupled with the coal, made it an easy choice to join his father to take over, or to help him with the cleaners in L.A. He hated the coal. So that's how they wound up over there, and they sold their gifted ten-room leased rooms for twenty-five hundred bucks, which my grandparents allowed them to keep those proceeds. So they had that money with them over there in L.A., and then when that happened, my grandfather on my mother's side felt like, okay, we've done this landlording stuff in Chicago, and we don't like the cold weather either. Let's look for something in L.A. And that's how they found this collection of stucco units. They sold the Oakenwald stuff and parleyed those proceeds into that place. I'm envisioning that my grandmother is still carrying those worthless electric bonds, because now they're paying off. See? They're paying off. They have their own place back in sunny L.A., or sunny Southern California, it's the first time they're actually living in L.A. But yeah, and so they had that place, wow, for the longest time. And so Nori winds up marrying Auntie Suzanne, they live in one of the units, we're living above them, and Uncle Harvey has this little, I guess it's a one-bedroom, also in that complex. And then my grandparents lived in the fourth. So the whole family is back together again in L.A. inside this Orchard Avenue place.

BN: Are the other tenants mostly other Nisei?

JF: Yeah. One was a teacher, my dad wound up leaving the post office on the suggestion of Matt Matsuoka, not sure you're familiar with that name, but Matt was a close family friend through my mom. All our social relations start from my mom. [Laughs]

BN: That's not unusual.

JF: Not unusual.

BN: Usually the woman's side.

JF: Okay, that's good. The same is true here in this house. [Laughs]

BN: Wait, is Matt the guy that, later in life, was very involved with Ellison Onizuka?

JF: Hmm, could have been, I'm not sure. He was one of the mucky mucks with American Honda.

BN: Yeah, that's the same guy.

JF: Is that him? Okay.

BN: I knew him. I traveled with him to Houston to collect materials relating to Ellison Onizuka.

JF: Oh, very good, okay. What a small world.

BN: Yeah, no, we're all separated by one degree, basically.

JF: Yeah. And so my mom gets a secretarial job in Matt's office. I think it was called TropiCal at the time, and it was right next door to Rosie's hot dog stand. And so I used to love leaving 32nd Street Elementary School and going to see my mom. We would cross through USC and, of course, they got baseball bats that had been discarded because they were cracked, but then we would just tape 'em up and reuse them ourselves. Same with the baseballs that they would leave out there. And then we'd show up at my mom's place, "we" being Jim Lee and I. He was my best friend, Don't know what happened to him. Anyway, the two of us would go into my mom's office, my mom would see us, and then she'd reach into her purse and flip us a quarter, and then we'd go next door to Rosie's where we'd get a big bag of french fries, and then she would drizzle all this ketchup all over them. [Laughs] Best french fries ever. But I remember that... what else were we talking about now?

BN: We had left, your dad had left the post office.

JF: Oh, yeah, he goes into teaching because Matt Matsuoka says that they have this special program at USC where you can get your teacher's credential and your administrative credential which allows you to go into public school administration if you choose to. But you have to do a five-year stint in the classroom. That's what he's doing, he becomes a fifth-grade elementary school, I think he's at Breed Street Elementary School in Boyle Heights. It was kind of a rough neighborhood back then, or starting to get rough. And then he really enjoys teaching, but just as an aside, that's the time period when we moved from Crenshaw to...

BN: Orchard Avenue.

JF: Orchard Avenue over to the Crenshaw area. So I'm leaving 32nd Street School, which I really liked. I really enjoyed it there. I remember my last grade that I completed there was third grade, and my teacher was Mr. Schaffer who winds up being good buddies with my dad later as a school principal. Anyway, I remember Mr. Schaffer, because he would always stick me between Bonnie and Connie Funk. They would sit people alphabetically in those days, and so he'd use me to split these identical twins so he could tell them apart. That was so funny, but he was a really good teacher.

BN: So you're nine or ten when you were moving to this...

JF: So this is '59.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.