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BN: And then what did he, we're going to jump to World War II in a minute, but he was born 1916, so he's already an adult at that time. What was he doing around the time the war broke out?

JF: Let's see now. Oh, he graduated as valedictorian from Belmont High School. And he told me that he was stressing out about having to deliver this speech, which all valedictorians -- evidently, I wouldn't know, not being one, or not even close -- have to present. And in those days, he said no index cards were allowed, you had to do everything extemporaneously or make an appearance. And so you were just speaking. And so he was stressing out over that. He was at a friend's house watching a baseball game just to relax, or listening to the baseball game on the radio when the L.A. earthquake struck. They went outside and they watched the pavement on the street that was fronting the house ripple like ocean waves, and he couldn't believe it. So because of that, and all the destruction that occurred after, his valedictorian speech was cancelled, the whole graduation was cancelled. And so he was so relieved from that, that he didn't have to do that anymore, so that was a big stress relief, but he never told me what his speech was. It's lost to history. [Laughs]

BN: That would have been the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, right?

JF: Right. So he had graduated just prior to that. So he went to work immediately because Togo, it was Togo's turn first to attend college. The family couldn't afford to send more than one person, one child at a time to college. They ran a dry cleaners called Parkview Cleaners and then, yeah, they just didn't have the money. So they put Jack to work with a friend who owned the vegetable shop, fruit and vegetable shop way up in Van Nuys somewhere, I think, San Fernando Valley. And so he would make the trip out there with my grandfather on my father's side, Otohiko. And the cars would putt-putt along, he said it wouldn't be more than 30 miles an hour so it would take him quite a while to get out there. So he'd get dropped off Friday, no, Saturday morning, and then he wouldn't be picked up by the family until Friday morning. So he had Fridays all to himself. And he said he would go into that restroom inside the tiny fruit and vegetable stand and just cry thinking that this was going to be his life forever, because Togo, his older brother, was still at UCLA. So his job there at this fruit and vegetable stand was to really be the operations guy for the owner's brilliant business model, which was he was going to go to all the large grocery stores and markets and buy up all their unwanted crates of fruit and vegetables for cents on the dollar and have my dad sift through that in order to pull out what was sellable. And so he would go through all these crates of Muscat grapes, he remembers, with all the bees hovering over it. And tomatoes, and I forgot what else really stuck in his memory, but those two in particular he remembers as being the grossest to have to sift through. But evidently, when you could buy a... what did he say? A bag of carrots for a nickel, they had a line of customers waiting for the store to open every morning. So I guess he executed his business model successfully thanks to my dad's hard work.

So that lasted until Togo finally graduated, then they said, "Okay, Jack, it's your turn." He was able to attend. He majored in economics, graduated third in his class, I think, of 1941. And then qualified for a scholarship to Harvard of all places, but the sponsor, the dean of the school, who informed him of the good news, discouraged him from going, and my dad thinks it's because he was Nihonjin and the guy didn't like Nihonjins. And the dislike and disrespect towards each other was mutual. My dad didn't like this guy either very much, so just summed up his attitude towards him as, "Just piss on it," I'm just going to forget about that and move on. He wound up getting a job selling the latest technology of the time which was commercial refrigeration. And so because of his passable skills speaking Nihongo, he was able to sell this newfangled stuff to all the fruit and vegetable people with whom he had an intimate knowledge of their...

BN: Which there were many. And there were very huge Japanese...

JF: Yeah, so he was like the top salesman for this owner of this business who lived in Newport Beach. My dad got seasick so easily. He'd get seasick in the restaurant at Redondo Beach pier if the water glass, if the water in the water glass was shifting. [Laughs] So that's how sensitive he was. Anyway, the owner of this refrigeration business lived in Newport Beach, had a boat and all that. And so he invited Jack or insisted that Jack join him on a weekend outing on a sailboat going over the waves, and he forced himself to go even though he dreaded the whole day and probably was miserable. He never really got, much to tell about that. But he loved the job, and he worked at it so hard he wound up contracting tuberculosis. So he gets thrown into Barlow Sanatorium where they specialize in recuperation therapy for TB patients. And he was in there and doing real well there. They have a great regimen. I only know this because I myself wound up being there as a high school freshman.

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