<Begin Segment 1>

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.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

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.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

But he does so well, he winds up being transferred to what I guess can be considered a skilled nursing facility today. And this is located in the Santa Monica area, don't know the name of the facility or anything. But he was doing well enough to help out in the kitchen staff, and he was in charge of monitoring the inventory and being an econ major, good with numbers. He was just really on top of everything. And he noticed that some of the goods were being pilfered somehow. It wasn't the staff, because the staff was all former TB patients or recuperating TB patients. And so he confronted the director on it, and he knew, pretty much, that it was the director who was pilfering the "good stuff" for his own family. So he went straight to his office and told him, "I got the numbers and you're doing this. You're cheating the families of the patients who are paying you money to have you take care of their relatives and sons and daughters here. It's got to stop." So the director told him, "Jack don't worry, I've got it under control. It's not going to happen again." And he immediately called the FBI and called my dad a "Jap troublemaker," and, "You got to pick this guy up and get him out of here." So that happened.

BN: Just to be clear, this is before the war started?

JF: I think it must have been... that he was there in early 1942.

BN: So it was after the war had started.

JF: Yeah, and probably after the Executive Order 9066.

BN: And then just to go back, I think you didn't mention where your dad went to school.

JF: Oh, Belmont High School.

BN: No, I mean, college.

JF: Oh, UCLA.

BN: UCLA. And then he graduated with the economics degree. And then, well, let's jump to the wartime then. He's in this institution, he's separate from the family, then Pearl Harbor comes. Then he has his, you mentioned the boss kind of sics the FBI on him, and then what... can you kind of pick up the story from there?

JF: Yeah. He climbs into the car of this FBI agent who's come to take him to wherever and asks him where we're going. And he said, "I'm supposed to take you to Tule Lake, that's where they take all the 'Jap' troublemakers." It's a long road for a trip up there.

BN: Well, it's hundreds of miles away from down here.

JF: So along the way, my dad enjoyed talking to people, and of course he's well-read, he can talk on any topic. And he and the FBI agent kind of become road buddies during this trip. And they stop... well, along the way, my dad was able to explain his side of the story to this agent. And then other things happened, my dad, he used to sing and dance and he had a good voice, singing voice. So he wound up singing along with Frank Sinatra whenever a Sinatra song came on. He still did that like when he was ninety years old, he sang "South of the Border" acapella at his ninetieth birthday. Anyway, the FBI agent and he pulled over to a cafe to have, share a couple of beers because they're now road buddies. And the FBI agent tells him, "Give me a few minutes, I'll be right back." Doesn't know where he goes. Comes back and he tells my dad, "Jack, you're not going to go to Tule Lake, which is where I was supposed to take you, but you're going to go to Heart Mountain now and I'll take you there myself so you could be with your family. That's where your family has been relocated." That's another long road trip. Unfortunately, after he gets there, in the excitement, I guess, of being reunited with his family and not seeing them for a couple of years now, he fails to get any contact information for that agent and they lose track of each other. But he always wanted to get back in touch with him to thank him for making that phone call on his behalf and getting him transferred to be with his family. And that's how he wound up at Heart Mountain.

BN: Interesting story, I've never heard that one, that before.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

BN: So we'll come back to him in a minute, because I want to come back now to talk about your mom and your mom's side of the family.

JF: Yeah, we were closer to my mother's half of the family. I don't know why that happened. I don't know if my dad influenced that or what. But yeah, my mom, she was the oldest of three kids.

BN: And then what was her name?

JF: Dorothy Chizuko Kitaoka. Everybody knew her and called her Chizi. So she had two younger brothers, my uncle Nori and uncle Harvey. Those were the Kitaoka boys. They were, all three of them were born in quick succession, like almost within a year, year and a half of each other. And so they were all born on a farm that my grandfather had leased. I think it was a fifteen acre, they called it a truck farm in the Sawtelle slash Venice area. They lived on... oh, I forgot to get you that address, but it was on Culver Boulevard. And they said they grew celery, lettuce, carrots, other stuff. But the focus was on celery because of the soil. But prior to that, my grandfather and grandmother had lived at the base of the Uinta Mountains somewhere in Utah. I forgot what the name of the city was. Because he had, when he first landed -- I'm kind of going backwards, sorry for jumping around. But he was the second-born son in his family. They lived in Takakamachi in Kochi on Shikoku island. And his older brother was in charge of running this rice store. I had a picture of that rice shop. And as the second-born, he wasn't beholden to the family obligations the way his firstborn, his older brother was. So he decided, once he graduated from high school, he was going to make his fortune in the United States. So he boards the ship, it lands in Hawaii after going past it because it's a foggy night. They turn around and they finally land in Honolulu. He stays for three months and then continues on to the San Francisco Bay area and finds a job as, deliberately so, as a houseboy, even though he hated the job. He wanted to force himself to learn English. So a smart guy, smart kid, I should say. He landed on his eighteenth birthday, 1905. So let's see here. He worked for six months, well enough to learn the language, and then leaves because they're hiring track layers for the Union Pacific for I think twelve years 'til he saves up enough money. And they were only paid, I think it was a dollar twenty-five a day. So somehow he manages to save enough money to contact his family in Osaka now. They've moved the store to Osaka and asks the family to arrange for a marriage. He included a photograph, luckily it was of himself. And then the woman that he married was from a family that they were familiar with from Takakamachi. So she agrees to the marriage, she comes over, he comes to pick her up and they, through this picture exchange, can identify each other.

And she takes her back home to the base of the Uinta Mountains, and it's this one room, dirt floor cabin with a potbelly stove for a cooking device and a heater. And she can't stand it because Shikoku is kind of a temperate climate similar to where we are right now. According to my mom, the day that she decides to put her foot down and break her silent acquiescence of her living conditions was when she was out in the back of the cabin shampooing her hair. And then a wave of frozen air comes down the Uinta Mountains and it flash freezes her shampooed hair in place. And she just can't stand it anymore, and she goes inside to the cabin and tells my grandfather, "We've got to leave here. I can't stand living here anymore, I can't take another winter." And it's only been her second winter. [Laughs] So luckily, though, she had been corresponding with her best friend from Takakamachi who happened to marry a guy named Sakioka. I forgot what his, it was real long, like samurai sounding name. But he shortened it to Roy just so everybody could remember it. Roy Sakioka. So okay, Roy and Tomi lived in the Sawtelle area, and she had been writing to tell Koima, my grandmother, about how wonderful it is there, "You've got to join us here. Roy can show you how to grow vegetables and there's a leased plot of land nearby and we'll save it for you," all this stuff. So she makes it sound really inviting and easy. And so my grandfather and grandmother decide to leave. He leaves his job as a section leader. I have a picture of that photograph where he's standing on the caboose. I could show it to you maybe. They leave and join the Sakiokas in the Sawtelle/Venice area, and they leased that fifteen-acre plot and they began farming even though my grandfather was not exactly a farmer before. So through the guidance of Roy, he learns how to take care of crops, and Roy shows him all the irrigation techniques that he learned as a successful farmer. And according to my mom, they never had any pocket money during the Depression years, but they always had something to eat. Is my wife coming now? Anyway, so my mom, Nori and Harvey were born in quick succession after they settled at the farm.

BN: So they were all born in California? So they kind of grew up in the farming, truck farming environment.

JF: Yes. So most of the labor, though, was from my two uncles. And you might think how much can an eight year old and nine year old do on a farm? Evidently they can run the whole damn thing in those days. So they told me about having to wake up before school and do a little bit with Ojiichan and Obaachan out there, Obaachan would be in the kitchen making them their lunches. Off they'd go to school, they went to Playa Del Rey Elementary School. Evidently my uncle Harvey said it was kind of a poor school because he remembered at Christmastime all these gifts were being donated to the school for distribution to the kids there. So he said he doesn't remember it being a poor school and they didn't think of themselves as being poor at all. But it was predominately a Japanese and Mexican population.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

BN: Then your mom, being a girl, didn't have...

JF: The same responsibilities on the farm.

BN: On the farm.

JF: No. She was pretty much saved from that. Helped my grandmother in the kitchen, but yeah, she didn't have to get her hands dirty, but she still kind of was growing up as a tomboy because of the influence primarily of Nori. He was a real prankster. He used to play a lot of tricks on her and torment her. But so in response, she was a pretty tough cookie as she calls herself. So they wound up shifting my mother back to Japan so that she could grow up to be what they called a "proper young lady," and she wasn't turning out that way. So they sent her back to her aunt in Osaka where she lived for three and a half years, for all of middle school.

BN: Wow.

JF: And she was teased over there, she hated it, and they called her a "beanpole." [Laughs] I don't know what that is in Nihongo, but evidently it's derogatory.

BN: Not good.

JF: And they would say things, some of the young boys would say, "Yeah, we're gonna kick the United States' butt, just wait." And then she said, "What are you talking about, you guys? You guys are nuts." But let's see, what else do I remember?

BN: You said she was there three-ish years?

JF: Yeah. So she enrolled in these flower arranging classes and classical Japanese, and she took koto lessons.

BN: This is like in the mid-'30s, right?

JF: Yeah, late '30s.

BN: Mid to late '30s. And where in Japan?

JF: In Osaka.

BN: Because by that time, Japan is already in sort of this war footing and heavily nationalistic and all of that.

JF: Oh, yeah.

BN: Did she pick up a fair amount of Japanese?

JF: Yes. Although it was, she came back with that Osaka-ben. So instead of "Konnichi wa," it's, "Konnichi waa." [Laughs] And so I can't tell the difference, but evidently, people immediately picked up on it and would kind of snicker and laugh. But she was never embarrassed by it.

BN: How did she manage to get back?

JF: My grandfather made several trips back and forth. So I collected the manifests off of Ancestry.com, so they made at least four trips. On one of those she would retreat back. She wound up going to Venice High School as a freshman, reunites with her longtime friend from kindergarten, Mae Kakehashi, who I think is still around. Yeah, they're both West L.A. girls. And so she folded right back into jitterbugging with Mae. Mae had kind of a tough high school time because her parents, I'm not sure how they died, but both her mother and father passed away in quick succession. So it was up to Frank, the oldest in their family, to be responsible, be the parent. She wanted to keep the sisters and he together so that they wouldn't be institutionalized. So he left high school and began working. And Mae says that he would leave a dollar for her on the table before he left for work, and when she went up and went off to school with her younger sister, she would take that dollar and she knew that she had to make dinner for the family using that one dollar bill. Mae's younger sister is... I can't remember, she's the Songbird of Manzanar.

BN: Oh, Mary.

JF: Mary.

BN: Mary Nomura.

JF: Mary Nomura, yes, that's Mae Kakehashi's younger sister. I mean, that's a little aside.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

BN: But she goes to Manzanar and your mom goes to...

JF: Jerome.

BN: Jerome.

JF: Yes. So they work that farm, and the two boys, there's this famous story of how, depending on who told it, my uncle Nori was driving the tractor, or my, I suspect it was Uncle Harvey driving the tractor back to this little shed where they kept it. And the tractor is one of these little kerosene power steel wheeled contraptions that, very unstable, especially if you have two people on the top of it, it makes it really unstable. And so Harvey, I suspect, was driving back to the barn with Nori holding his shoulders behind him, and the tractor veers off into one of these irrigation ditches. So it starts to topple, Harvey jumps out and Nori says he saves Harvey that day from being crushed by the tumbling tractor. But sometimes I wonder if it was the other way around. [Laughs] They were so close in age and they were always together, the two of them. And Nori was always Harvey's protector. They couldn't be more opposite in personality. Because of his responsibilities as the English-speaking male and oldest male on the farm, Nori was the one who dealt with the dealers and the wholesalers who would come to buy whatever the family could sell. And so you couldn't pull anything over Nori, he was really sharp with numbers. And then Harvey would always be in the background, but he would be kind of the manual labor. Once the deal was agreed to, then the crates had to be loaded up onto a truck, and that's where Harvey would come in and be doing all the heavy lifting. So both of them got into weightlifting, but Harvey was just more of a natural athlete, I think. Although Nori was pretty gifted himself, and wound up becoming a golden gloves boxer, crazy things.

BN: Did they do any competitive weightlifting?

JF: They did in camp.

BN: Okay. That actually was this odd Nisei niche. There were a bunch of Nisei weightlifters.

JF: Exactly, exactly. And Harvey was kind of a star because he was so young, yet he could lift so much. He was lifting 250 pounds fourteen times as a fourteen-year-old. So kind of incredible. Anyway, so they leave the farm because an opportunity comes up where my grandfather's good friend is going back to Japan. So this is 1940, '41? I think end of 1940.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

JF: So my grandfather feels like it's a good opportunity to buy this chicken ranch or egg farm, don't know what... I think it goes by both terms. And it cost thirty thousand dollars, which was a huge sum of money. So they had a down payment, and then for collateral they put up these thirty thousand dollars' worth of Tokyo Electric bonds that they have. So with that, they take over this farm, and then again, my...

BN: Where is this farm?

JF: Oh, the farm is in Artesia. And that area, Lakewood, Artesia, is mostly, at that time, it's mostly a dairy farming area. And most of those dairy farms were run by Dutch people. So they go from, like, a Mexican/Japanese neighborhood over to this Caucasian area dominated by these Dutch dairy farmers. And they go to a high school called Excelsior Union High School. Kind of small in comparison, especially Venice High School where they had transferred from. So my uncle Harvey is a freshman there, Nori enters as a junior, and my mom is a graduating senior there. Oh, no, she had graduated from Venice, so she didn't attend there. So it's just Harvey and Nori in that high school. And it's a lot different there because my uncle Nori, he doesn't take crap from anybody. And he had been befriended by this guy in Venice High School who was in charge of, kind of a club. Maybe in today's terms they'd view it as a gang, but it was a group of Mexican American guys who liked to lift weights, so that fit in with Nori's passion, and they liked to box and just liked to get into a fight. Even though they weren't looking for trouble and people left them alone, it would just kind of happen. And my uncle Nori told me the story of his initiation into that group where after they taught him how to box for a full summer, in order to become a full-fledged member of their club, he had to box somebody for real. So they wind up going down, the leader of the group, and he and two others, the four of them pile into a pickup truck. They go down to Venice and they're at this dive bar where the leader goes in and then comes back out and tells Nori, "Whoever comes out of that door next, you have to fight them. Just pick a fight with them. If you want to become one of us, then that's what you got to do." Comes to, like, six foot something, maybe sailor on leave, he probably just drunk himself into stupefaction, but he's able to walk out of there. And so Nori is instructed to go challenge the guy. And so he walks up to him and Nori tells him, "Give me all your money." And they guy takes a look at him and says, "You fucking Jap," and he starts this haymaker from like sidewalk level, it was telegraphed the whole way. Nori dodges them with a single punch. He floors this much larger hakujin navy sailor guy, and he's in the club. [Laughs]

BN: Was there a name for the club?

JF: He never told me. And he only told me this story -- I don't think anybody in the family really knew about it, now they do. Because I myself had gotten into some trouble, and so he was the one who picked me up from jail, and he's giving me a ride back out to his place at the time Nori lived with his family out in Anaheim. So that's quite a ways to go from L.A. County. And so on the way there, he's telling me a story, because he says, "I know what it feels to be the black sheep of the family." And I thought, "Am I the black sheep of the family now?" [Laughs] Gee, thanks. "Thanks, Uncle Nori, you make me feel better." And so he's telling me all these things, and there was a lot more that I don't even want to divulge. But it was like, you're kidding me. Anyway, that's Nori. On the other hand, Uncle Harvey, total opposite. So his experience in high school is he kind of tried to fit in. He cut his hair. Where Nori had, what do they call that? Top hat and fenders? Flat top and fenders? Anyway, it was kind of this duck tail thing going on. And Harvey wanted to fit in, so he had his mother cut his hair just before. There's a funny picture of him standing with his freshman class at Excelsior Union where he stands out because they had him standing in the front row. Even though everyone else was seated in neat little rows, Harvey is on the far right standing, and he looks like he's the Hulk, the Japanese Hulk, he's so built. He's just huge especially in comparison to all these Dutch farmer kids, all very short, slight. And then on the other end of the bleacher stands the homeroom teacher. It's kind of a funny picture because he was so big. But his hair, he kind of asked his mother to cut his hair so he could fit in with the Dutch boys who'd wear their hair slicked to the side and stuff. He didn't want to be like Nori exactly. Turns out later he winds up kind of being like Nori. But the two of them do well in sports, especially after Nori convinces Harvey to join the football team with him, and act as his blocking guard. And there's an article that I salvaged from the school newspaper there where it described the first game of the season where "Halfback Nori Kitaoka scored three touchdowns in the first half," and then it doesn't continue, but in the picture you could tell it was behind the blocking of this younger brother pulling guard, Harvey, who probably wiped out all of the linebackers coming after Nori. But they were really into athletics, sports.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

JF: When Pearl Harbor happens, they're running that chicken farm. Oh, in the chicken farm, Chiz, my mother, doesn't escape from doing some labor there. So she's in charge of cleaning the eggs, which she hates. [Laughs] It's kind of a dirty job. But in comparison� to having to do what Harvey and Nori had to do, it's kind of a piece of cake. But they're in charge of mucking out the coops, which were old-fashioned colony style coops that they're kind of, the laying coops are arranged on the sides. You have a center aisle up the middle, there's straw all over the place to pick up the droppings, but unlike today's industrialized methods, the hens would be free to lay their eggs wherever they wanted to. So at times they'd reach the upper rafters there and lay there and inevitably you' get pelted by an unexpected egg falling on your head. So that's what Nori and Harvey had to do. Then they had to muck out all the dirty straw and then replace it with fresh straw. So they had five thousand layers, most of them were leghorn, so they were these white hens with red combs, and then they had one coop that was Rhode Island reds, I'm thinking, who laid brown eggs, more desirable. And so there were five rows of these coops. So as long as they did one coop every day, then the rest of the day was free for them. I have a picture of my uncle Nori in his zoot suit because, of course, he had to have his mother sew him some drapes, they called it. And so he's in the zoot suit, and Harvey is in something, just a plain white pressed t-shirt and khakis. They were at Huntington Beach, they spent a lot of time at Huntington Beach during that summer of '41.

BN: Was it your sense that the farm was doing reasonably well?

JF: Yeah, they did really well, I think. I don't know what the numbers were, but I know when they were forced to sell, right after Pearl Harbor, and then Executive Order 9066 is announced in February of '42, they were forced to sell the ranch. And at that time, they only had seven thousand dollars remaining on their mortgage. So they must have been just paying all the proceeds to pay down the principal. So when that happened, they sold it to the feed man, Dean Forrest, or Forrest Dean, yeah, Forrest Dean, that's right. He was their chicken feed man, and he would come with the pickup truck every Saturday and he would swap them the chicken feed, and then he paid them twenty-five bucks for loading up as much chicken manure into the back of his now empty pickup truck bed as possible. And so that was up to Harvey and Nori to do that. And at the time that they had to sell, they struck a deal with Forrest, and I think he asked them, "How much do you owe the bank?" And they told him, "It's about seven thousand," so he offered to clear that loan for them so that they wouldn't have any debt anymore. So that's all they could do, so at least they had that. And then the bank then returned the collateral, which were these now worthless Tokyo Electric bonds. But my grandmother saved those, that stack of Tokyo Electric bonds in the bottom of, the false bottom of, in the embroidered fabric satchel that she'd carry around by hand with her to Santa Anita. Even though they were worthless, my mom told her, "Mom, these things aren't worth anything anymore." I think it meant something to my grandmother because that chicken ranch was their first attempt to run a business, and they did it successfully. And it was their own, it wasn't leased, didn't belong to anybody else but the family. And so it was secured by those bonds, so I think she felt those bonds are going to be a way to secure her future for her family, she just couldn't part with them even though she knew they were worthless. So she made this false bottom in the bottom of this fabric case and carried it with her into camp. Anyway...

BN: You don't still have those?

JF: I had one sample, but we lost it at Orchard Avenue. Don't know where.

BN: That's a great story.

JF: Yeah.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

JF: So they wind up all going to Santa Anita. That's where... you know, my mom and uncles, they never really talked anything negatively about camp because I think for them it was like going on vacation. Finally they get to spend as much time as they wanted to, lifting weights in this "Mighty Midgets" or something, club that they were in, and then my mom wound up getting a job in the payroll department. So the payroll manager showed her accounting techniques. I don't know why, but all three of those Kitaoka kids were kind of pretty good with numbers. She does really well there, and he, the payroll manager, gets a letter from a friend in Chicago named George Plessing. And Mr. Plessing, who is a German guy, I mean, I don't know why I even mentioned that, it has nothing to do with the story. But he owns his own import-export firm, and he's looking for specifically a Nisei girl that needs a job, who's good with numbers. The payroll manager tells my mom, Chiz, about this opportunity, and says, "This is a way that you might be able to get out of camp." And my grandmother and grandfather always told the three kids, at night, when they were together in their barrack room, that this is no place for the family. And they all wanted a way to get out of camp as soon as they could. So by this time now they were in Jerome, Arkansas, and let's see now. She went in on April the 4th and leaves on April the 4th one year later. So April the 4th, 1943, she's one of the first four people to leave Jerome. The other three were men, I think all four of them were bound for Chicago, so they traveled together. But she got seated next to some hakujin guy who was real big and had no interest in her at all. I don't think they ever spoke, so it was a pretty quiet train ride. But she remembers looking back and, of course, they weren't allowed up come up to the train to see them off or anything. But they're at the fence, and she remembers... I forgot the Japanese term that she used to describe how she felt. But it was obviously a really sad time for her, and she watched as long as she could through the opening in the window as the lights of camp receded. So she winds up only spending a year there. The rest of the family gets out maybe nine months later, because they accept a sharecropping deal to sharecrop sugar beets back in Utah of all places. I don't know if that had anything to do with their accepting the offer. They go up to Utah and Harvey and Nori somehow earn enough credits to graduate from, I think their diploma says "Denan High School" or something like that. Anyway, it's marked as an Arkansas high school. And then they...

BN: Oh, you mean before they left?

JF: No. When they're in Utah, sharecropping, sugar beets, they were there.

BN: High school there.

JF: Yeah. They go to a high school there, but for some reason, the units are transferred back to the camp high school, and that's for the diploma.

BN: So their diplomas, it's Denson High in Jerome.

JF: Yes. Even though they don't appear in any Denson class photos or anything.

BN: Even though they're actually Utah.

JF: Yeah.

BN: That's an interesting... I wonder why that one.

JF: I don't know why the high school up there didn't put that on the diploma. And so in the meantime, they're still corresponding with the oldest, my mom, in Chicago. And she says, oh, she's being treated really nicely there. She was really apprehensive about meeting Mr. Plessing. She's never set eyes on him before she gets off the train. She's the only Japanese American girl, yet she's seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, I don't know. She must be nineteen. And Mr. Plessing walks up to her face and says, "Dorothy?" [Laughs] And she says, "Mr. Plessing?" And they go off together. He's a really friendly person. I had the chance to meet him actually when I was a young kid and he would take us to all these... he had this thing about hitting all the California missions, so we would take these road trips with Mr. Plessing. Anyway, he takes her to the office and she's flabbergasted that she's going to have her own desk right outside Mr. Plessing's office. And he's got everything neatly set up with her own Royal typewriter and her own telephone and her own chair and blotter and all that stuff. So she's super jazzed about being treated like royalty as a worker there. And then, inside his office, he introduces a woman who is a part of the Daughters of the Revolution or something, DAR. Anyway, this woman had spent some time in Glendale, and so was kind of sympathetic to the plight of the Japanese Americans, and she was working behind the scenes -- this is all happening before my mother even arrives -- she had arranged through the DAR and their relationship with the YWCA, YMCA? I don't know, that they had started up a business women's housing project in Chicago, and they secured a room for my mom. And so not only does she have this job waiting for her with her own workstation, and she finds out she's got her own place to stay, which was her primary concern. She doesn't know anybody in Chicago. So it was all prearranged for her by this woman and Dr. Plessing. So she stays there, and of course she's writing back home, and she's describing how wonderful everything's turning out for her, they don't have to worry about her. In fact, if they want, why not join her in Chicago if you can find work? So that's what they do.

My uncle Nori comes out first. He joins Chiz, and they wind up using what little money they've saved from their camp jobs, plus what Chiz is making, to parley it on leasing a ten-room, two floors of this walkup. So it consists of ten rooms that they can sublet. Evidently there weren't any rules against them doing that, so that's what they did. They lived in two of the rooms, and then they sublet the others to other Nisei who were looking for places to stay.

BN: It was probably good business, because there were a lot of Nisei looking for places to stay.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

JF: And this is at Clark and Division. And that winds up being where my parents meet, at Clark and Division. Well, not really that place, but a place that was rented by Kaz Sugiyama, who, this is backtracking now, we're kicking over to Heart Mountain. My dad has been dropped off there, he winds up enjoying himself over there, too. This is right after, I guess, George Igawa's big band loses its leader and a lot of their members, they wind up leaving and this kid named Tets Bessho takes over. He was a band member, but he winds up being the band leader. And my dad and Tets were friends, evidently, and my dad becomes the lead singer for the Tets Bessho Band in camp. So there's a WRA photo of my dad singing to a group of Nisei soldiers who are on leave. So it's kind of a somber, if you look at all the faces in this photo, it's kind of a somber night, I don't know, maybe it was my dad, because my dad is also singing. He's holding a mic in the background with Tets on the guitar behind him. But yeah, so he enjoyed himself as a leader of the band there, and at these dances that they have, Kaz Sugiyama is there. And Kaz is like the best dancer in camp. And prior to that, he and my mother -- this is the connection, like the three degrees of Asian connection or whatever. Back at Venice High School, Kaz and my mother were dance partners, that's what she calls him, so that's what he is. And Kaz's mother knows that Chiz is a real good catch, and so she doesn't want to let her go. [Laughs] And she asks my mother and Kaz to come over right after school one day because she's got a special event planned for them. And they sit down and she does this mock engagement ceremony between her son, Kaz, and my mother. They're high school seniors, and she does this whole Buddhist ritual thing with the sake pouring and they share the sake cups. And my mom is, she can't believe it, because she's seen the real ceremony. And here's this... you know that Buddhist, I forgot the name of it that they used to invoke the spirits. She's got a broom handle and he's cut out these tissue paper things to be the... anyway.

BN: So frankly it's a Shinto thing.

JF: Yes, a Shinto ceremony. And so Kaz can't believe it either, and they're both smirking at each other, but they play along. My mom never told her parents ever about that. I have this video where she told me about it. It's pretty hilarious. Anyway, so they're secretly engaged from that point forward, but then along comes Pearl Harbor, 9066, the Sugiyamas wind up going to Manzanar... no, Heart Mountain, and then my mom goes to Jerome, so their relationship ends. But my dad, being a singer at Heart Mountain, Kaz being the dancer at all these dances, they'd kind of become friends. And Kaz asked him into his barrack room one day and Jack, my dad, sees all these pictures of the same girl up on the, pinned into the two-by-fours. And so he asks about her. He said, "That was my old dance partner, my girlfriend Chiz. We don't keep in touch anymore, but I think she's in Chicago. If I get out, I'll let you know where I'm at, and then I'll reestablish connection with Chiz and I'll introduce you if you're interested in meeting her." And he said, "Yeah, yeah, that'd be great." So things happened, Kaz leaves, he goes to Chicago. He gets together with my mom, I don't know how serious they are, but he writes back to my dad, who's still at Heart Mountain, and gives him his address. Says, "Don't forget, if you ever get out, come see me here."

So he does that. He gets out, he goes to this address, knocks on the door, and my mother opens the door. He recognizes her instantly from all the pictures that Kaz had in his barrack room wall. And he says, "Chiz." And she doesn't know who he is, "Who are you? Are you here to see Kaz?" And he says, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm here to see Kaz. I thought this was his place." She said, "Yeah, it is, but he's not here right now. He got into a little bit of trouble." And then my dad asks what kind of trouble, and is it serious? And she kind of smirks and says, "No, the jerk just got in trouble with his boss's wife." [Laughs] "And so I don't know, he's having to straighten that out," but in the meantime, he's not there anyway. So she asks if he wants... if he wants to leave a message for Kaz. So he says, "No, actually, I'm here to meet you, because Kaz said he would introduce me to you." And she says, "What's your name?" He said, "Furumura, Jack." She said, "Oh, you're that singer? Yeah, Kaz told me about you." There's a seven year difference between them, so he's older. And my mom said when she looked at him for the first time, he had these rosy red cheeks, high forehead, and then a broad face. So he looked smart. [Laughs] I guess that's a compliment.

Anyway, she is attracted to him. He asks her to dinner and she agrees and they meet later that week at her place, though, not at Kaz's place, because she's just there cleaning up for him. And so her place is at Clark and Division, and when Jack, my dad, picks her up, he's dressed in a brand new suit. And she's kind of impressed, he has this pencil thin mustache over his top lip, looks very debonair. And they go together to a nearby Japanese restaurant and they're conversing. My dad is a chatterbox, and so is my mom, so they hit it off great. The bill comes, and my dad's looking at the bill, and then the whole mood changes. [Laughs] Because without... she finds out later that my dad had spent all his wages from, I think it was a real estate firm that he working with at the time, buying this new suit and having it tailored and all that crap. And so he had money, but not enough to quite cover the cost of dinner. And so he's fishing around in his wallet, Chiz can see he's kind of distressed, and she asked, "Do you need some help with the bill?" And he says, "Yeah, just a little bit, I'll tell you later." And so she helps him out. Luckily, she had some money. And so they get out of there and he tells her what happened, and then they laugh about it, and they agree to see each other. She said they had a whirlwind courtship, and six months later, they were married. So I guess it was destined.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

BN: Just to back up a little with your dad's side, he doesn't leave 'til like, this is...

JF: Very late.

BN: Fairly late. Do you know if there was... and the whole, basically his whole family stayed in camp.

JF: Yes, until the very last day.

BN: Yeah. So do you know what the story is there, or if they considered going out earlier? Because demographically, your dad's someone who you would think would have left early.

JF: I don't think they had anything going. They had sold their business, I don't know the details of that sale. I don't know why they never considered Chicago. But know once my parents were married for their honeymoon, they went back to Heart Mountain to, well, for Chiz to be introduced to the family and to find out what their plans were. Because this is, they were married October 14, 1945. And I only know that date because it's my wife's birthday. [Laughs] Anyway, so they're back at Heart Mountain, and it's, like, deserted by now.

BN: They were one of the last to leave.

JF: Yeah. So I don't know why they never left sooner, but both, I think Nellie and Rose were still there, Togo's still, I'm not... maybe Togo left. Yeah, I'm not sure. Anyway, I know the parents are still there, they're very impressed meeting my mom, and they can't believe Jack's good fortune, their son's good fortune in finding this proper young lady. And she defers all their compliments and stuff they way you're supposed to. [Laughs] But my mom said that on their way back, it reminded her of leaving camp, watching, this time they're in a car, but still, just watching camp recede in the background. It just reminded her of her whole experience.

Anyway, Jack's parents, my grandfather and grandmother on my dad's side, they wound up going back to L.A. from camp with just the fifty bucks between them. They resurrect Parkview Cleaners at the corner of Alvarado and Hoover. It's an intersection that, I think, today it's still there. It kind of splits, and they were right there at that split. But back then it was a real quiet neighborhood. My grandmother contracts tuberculosis, she's unable to work, she succumbs later, kind of quickly. So my grandfather asks Jack and Chiz if they could help out in the cleaner's. That's how they wind up leaving from Chicago to come back to L.A. And that's in early 1948, because that's when my sister was born. And I have a picture of my mom, obviously very pregnant, behind the counter at the Parkview Dry Cleaners with my dad and grandfather on either side of her. So that's where I was born. And when you lived in the back of the cleaners, my mom said she was in charge of pressing, running this commercial press, big machine, and saw the steam shooting out. And she had to meet the customers at the front desk because my dad had a job at the post office. So he was a mail sorter, so in those cases she had to manually slot the mail.

BN: At that time, wasn't that fairly unusual for a Nisei to have a federal...

JF: Yeah, postwar in L.A.

BN: Did he ever talk about how that came about?

JF: No. Must have been through my uncle Togo, his older brother, because my uncle Togo was with the post office, too, and he stayed with them for decades.

BN: A lot of Nisei prized those federal jobs, but there were, not many were able to get them until later, of course. But this very early postwar period, interesting.

JF: Yeah, maybe my dad's UCLA impressed somebody.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

BN: And then the cleaner's, it was the same name as before the war, it was a different location.

JF: Different location. My mom says she left me on the ironing service whenever a customer came in. So she would leave me there -- there's no side rails on this thing, ironing board. And then she would dash out to the front to take care of the front customers, and then come back to find me still there, safe and sound, didn't make that four-foot drop onto the concrete floor.

BN: At least that you know of.

JF: Yeah. And so that's why I had a flat head -- that's what she says. [Laughs] Kept me in there, kept me on the board.

BN: Do you remember the dry cleaners?

JF: No, not at all.

BN: Just what you've heard.

JF: The customers would also race in to say, "Hey girlie," -- that's what they called my mom -- "hey girlie, your daughter's out there. She might get hit by the traffic." They would say that about me when I was in diapers and crawling, she had to leave her pressing duties in order to run out and retrieve us from the sidewalk, because didn't want to get us smashed by cars. [Laughs]

BN: Were there just the two of you?

JF: Yeah, my sister and myself.

BN: And then we talked about this a little earlier, but I wanted to get back to this. You did not have a Japanese middle name like I'd say most Sansei.

JF: I did for a couple minutes.

BN: Did your sister?

JF: Yes, she did. She was given my grandmother's middle name, Aki, and my uncle Nori, his full name was Noriaki. His middle name was, of all things, Hiram. Don't ask me why. I tried to find out why, but who knows? And then Harvey's middle name was... good grief, I'm drawing a blank. Anyway, it was a Japanese name. So let's see. My mother... my father's father, my grandfather, so it was Otohiko Furumura. And so when I was born, first boy in the family, my father says, "I want him to have my initials, Jack Taro Furumura, JTF." So Jeffrey, okay, they agreed on that. And then for the T, my dad said, "Tadahiko," I guess because rhymes with Otohiko, there's some onomatopoeia or whatever you call that stuff. Anyway, my mother said, "Tadahiko, that's too Japanesey." [Laughs] "Let's just shorten that to 'Todd,' or, the way it looks, T-A-D, Tad," like in tadpole. So that's how I got my name. So for a few seconds there, I did have a real Japanesey name, but then my mother put her foot down. I guess she got that from her mother who put her foot down when her hair froze. All these critical moments in time that change things forever.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

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.

<Begin Segment 14>

BN: So we move to the Crenshaw area, and do you know why they moved?

JF: Yeah. It's another real estate related deal. They purchase... I don't know how they do this, and it's still a mystery to my sister and my cousin, Mark Kitaoka, how they were able to accrue these properties, the wealth to purchase them, but I'm sure they leveraged themselves a lot. Because he didn't pay all cash the way deals are happening nowadays. But they were able to come up with a down payment, which, for them in those days, must have been substantial, although to us now, it's like pennies. But anyway, they purchased a five-unit complex on Victoria Avenue, just behind... I was about to say Cutter Ford, but that's over there in Pearl City. Lincoln Mercury and Ford, or where Family Savings and Loan is now, or used to be a Goodyear tire place. But anyway, one block west of Crenshaw near Rodeo, sorry, near... is it Obama Boulevard now?

BN: Yeah.

JF: But back then it was Rodeo Road. So Victoria and then Rodeo Place ended right there, and we lived in the unit, they called it the owner's unit but it was just another apartment in the back behind the four units facing Victoria Avenue. So this unit was in the back on top of the garage that were for all the tenants. And in between that space was kind of a turnaround, concrete slab that separated the front units from where we lived. So that's where I moved in '59. And I remember the first day of school. I wrote about this, I remember this so vividly. My dad liked to tell us stories, "us" being my older sister Kathleen and I. Whenever he would pick us up in his Karmann Ghia -- and he always had a Karmann Ghia. He had his first Karmann Ghia from '57 to '67, and he bought his, that Karmann Ghia lasted until, I think, 1990 or something. Anyway, he had it forever. Anyway, whenever we're in the Karmann Ghia, he's talking to us because he liked to do that. And he would take any advantage of having us listening to him. And at every opportunity... and that came for me on my first day of school. So it's my first day as a new student at Coliseum Street school which was the neighborhood school maybe three-fourths of a mile away, right down Coliseum Street. And there was one signal at Buckingham Road that is the only place where you would stop before you get to Coliseum Street school another few blocks up. So he's driving me there, and there's a red light, and we come to a stop. And then my dad is looking at me, and he says, "You know, Jeff..." I think it's because he saw how he saw how new students are being treated at Breed Street Elementary School.

BN: Because he's a teacher.

JF: Yeah, because he's a teacher and he has a yard to be hearing all that other stuff. And they kind of get picked on, so that's okay. He tells me, "If anybody calls you a 'Jap,' you hit 'em." And this is my father telling me this. Before that, we never really conversed about anything serious. We would go on surf fishing trips to Zuma or occasionally drive all the way to Oxnard if the corbina were hitting on rumor. [Laughs] But he would tell me, he showed me how to tie on a hook and bait a hook and look for sand crabs and all that stuff. Never really anything serious -- and this is the first time he really looked at me serious -- he said, "If anybody calls you a 'Jap,' you hit 'em." "Okay, sir." [Laughs] And we go to school and he's talking to Mrs. Stovall, and the irony of this whole thing is that twenty years later maybe, he winds up being the principal at Coliseum Street school, and Mrs. Stovall is still the office manager there, becomes his office manager. [Laughs] Anyway, so Mrs. Stovall greets him at the desk, and while he's registering me, he says, "Mrs. Stovall, can I ask you a question?" And she looks at him and says, "Yes, Mr. Furumura." He asks, "Are there any Orientals at this school?" He's asking for me. And Mrs. Stovall chuckles and says, "Mr. Furumura, Coliseum Street school is sixty-five percent Oriental." So, of course, he's relieved to hear that, but I'm still remembering, "If anybody calls you a 'Jap,' you hit him." Anyway, so I wound up getting into fights with Gary Royce, Glen Hirayama, and I think Albert Grannucci or something like that, my first week I get sent to the office three times. Not because they called me a "Jap," no one ever did at that school, but I was kind of pudgy. Like even Auntie Suzanne, Uncle Nori's wife, would call me "Butterball." So it was like, "Oh, how's my little Butterball doing?" So my dad's instructions were, you fight anybody who disrespects you. That's how I interpreted what he said. He was probably more specific in his meaning, but to me, to my nine-year-old ears, I heard it the wrong way, maybe. So ever since then, it's like, I don't know, you've seen the movie with Steve Martin, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid?

BN: Yes.

JF: So whenever somebody says, "cleaning woman" to him, he's triggered with this uncontrollable rage, and that's the way it is with me. If anybody throws a racial epithet my way, specifically at me, I just can't stop myself. [Laughs] So it's gotten me into trouble sometimes, but at least I have lucked out. Nothing legal, legal trouble, just interpersonal kind of things. [Laughs] Because it's always interpersonal.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

BN: So the area you lived in, that area was one of the big Japanese American residential clusters at that time.

JF: Yeah, black and yellow. Bumblebee.

BN: So were most of your friends other Sansei?

JF: Yeah. When I got to sixth grade, I did well enough in sixth grade for Mr. Kilagore, our teacher, to assign me to flag duty. So that meant early in the morning, before school started, you had to be there attach the American flag and the California flag and then hoist them up on the flagpole. And then at the end of the day, though, that was the best part. Because you were excused from class early so that you could go back to the flagpole and pull it down, and then you had to fold it like that in a triangle. And so I remember being paired with Danny Uematsu. Danny, if you're out there, forgive me. [Laughs] But Danny later, he was kind of a rascally dude. He winds up becoming one of the Ministers later in high school, but that's another story. Anyway, Danny and I --

BN: "Ministers," the gang, not ministers the...

JF: Oh, no, nothing connected to religion whatsoever. [Laughs] Anyway, Danny and I used to be part of this, the two-man flag retrieving group. And so Danny taught me how to flick my tongue in order to spit little spitballs up in the air in a nice arc and land it right into the American flag, and it was like, "Huh? You're doing that?" And he would say, "Yeah." He was so funny. We were like the worst pair to be flag retrievers a teacher could possibly assign. But anyway, we folded it up and turned it in and that was our duty done. And we would go play kickball until they closed down the playground, kickball and softball.

BN: Did your parents make you go to Japanese language school?

JF: I think they tried. Because I know my sister went. This is only on Saturdays, though, and I think I went once, and that was... I don't think I had any say in it. I don't know what happened, why I didn't continue. I don't think my sister continued for very much longer either, and neither one of us know Nihongo.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

BN: And then were you involved with any of the JA basketball or Boy Scouts, those types of things?

JF: Back then it was the CYC? So I was a part of the Red Sox organization. I was a pitcher during baseball season, and then, of all things, a center during basketball. Because of my tremendous five foot, nine-inch height. [Laughs] I can't understand why they use me at center. Anyway, yeah, I liked playing sports. I also belonged to this YMCA group led by Cedrick Shimo. He was our group leader, and Cedrick was a great coach. He was also the Red Sox baseball coach, so he was a very influential adult in my life besides my two parents and my uncle Harvey and Uncle Nori.

BN: Those two uncles lived nearby?

JF: They moved to the Crenshaw area. My uncle Nori started a family with my cousin Mark and then later Marianne, but they moved to Orange County to Anaheim where I think they were pretty much the only Japanese there. I think the neighbors in the Flippen Drive neighborhood that they lived on, drafted some kind of a letter trying to keep him out. And then he made, I'm sure that only motivated my uncle Nori to move in. [Laughs] But yeah, Nori was a tough guy, real fighter. And then Harvey, the younger brother Harvey, he winds up... he was drafted, as was Nori, right after he got his high school diploma. He went into the army, he was training, I think, as a replacement for the Battle of the Bulge thing, reinforcements there in Europe. He and my wife's father, Tadatoshi Endo, they were on the same unit, and they're together on the Queen Mary when the war ends in early May of '45. So all of them get reassigned to, they call it the GRS, Grave Registration Service. So they're in charge of...

BN: They're on the boat going over?

JF: Over to Europe, yeah. And so they wind up getting transferred to the GRS in Berlin, in occupied Berlin. So they were in charge of retrieving the bodies of the dead, and then separating the personal items and then taking care of the remains and shipping them back from Frankfurt to New York. So, yeah, he stayed there until, I think it was October '46, which is when my uncle Nori, who curiously, my uncle Nori, I don't know why, he was drafted later. And this is where things get kind of mysterious. Because I asked my mom, I can't find service records for Nori, just this one little thing that mentions his dates, service dates, but it doesn't say what branch of the service. And she says, "That's because he was in the CIA." [Laughs] CIA? And I told her, "You mean MIS?" And she said, "No, pretty sure he said the CIA. Now you know, so I have to kill the both of us." [Laughs] Anyway, I have no idea.

BN: There were a fair number of Nisei who were in the predecessor to the CIA, the OSS.

JF: OSS, yeah.

BN: So maybe...

JF: Maybe, who knows? Anyway, I can't find anything about it. I was able to find a bunch of stuff on Uncle Harvey, because I'm trying to finish this book about him. Anyway, Harvey winds up staying in the military because he can't find work once he leaves the Chicago area where he graduated from the University of Chicago at Champaign. He wound up being the only college grad in our family then with a degree in mechanical engineering. And he can't find work in Chicago even though he's got this college degree. At the time, there was a nationwide coal strike going on. So he winds up going to Chicago because his stipend runs out from the GI Bill. And he lives in that one-bedroom unit with the rest of the family and tries to find work in L.A. but it's a no-go for him here or there, too. And he doesn't want to settle, he has too much pride, I guess, and he wants something that's going to challenge him and take advantage of his training and education. So my mom says he saw a poster, and the poster challenged him. And he winds up enlisting as a naval aviator. So he recalls going into the office and meeting the recruiting officer, and the recruiting officer takes one look at him and he asks the question that disqualifies just about ninety percent of the people walking in to be, who want to be a pilot, says you have to have a college degree. And my uncle Harvey says, "Yeah, got that," which surprises the recruiting officer. So he says, "Well, you'll have to pass a physical," that's my uncle Harvey you're talking to. So, of course, he passes with flying colors. Two weeks later, this is late in May 1949, 1950, I can't remember now, I think it's 1950. Yeah, 1950, I'm positive. He is on a train going all the way to Pensacola, Florida, where he's supposed to be in ground school or preflight school, they called it, at Pensacola, Florida. And he winds up becoming the first Japanese American fighter pilot and flies a tour in Korea off the USS Princeton.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

BN: So what is he doing -- I mean, this is around the time you're born, so what's he doing when you're growing up?

JF: What is my uncle Harvey...

BN: Yeah. It sounds like they're a fairly large part of your life.

JF: He winds up in preflight with the only other Black cadet. A guy named David Campbell, Jr. David Campbell, Jr. was raised by a single mom in L.A. of places, but his mom dies when he's twelve years old. I don't know how, can't find records on it, and David is retrieved by his grandmother and grandfather in Augusta, Georgia, and that's where he grows up. Ends up becoming a star athlete, and is the captain of his basketball team. I don't know how he got into the naval aviator school, but he's there and he excels in that preflight class. He does so well, he's at the top of the entire regiment, and that's like four hundred cadets. So he's given the special honor where you're given these stripes to put on your lapel, and for two weeks you're given special recognition and stuff, and there's a little article about him too in the local paper that I dug out. But he and my uncle Harvey were kind of friends, buddies, because they were the only people of color in the regiment, probably on the whole base, Navy, at that time. So they wind up going from preflight to basic flight where my uncle has the real good fortune of having this Charles Parr be his lieutenant instructor, and that's who teaches him to fly in this really lucky -- that sound you're hearing, that's the dog eating. Anyway, so Harvey falls in love with flying, it just comes natural to him, thanks to Lieutenant Parr. And he has a successful basic flight, goes on to advanced flight. And at the end of advanced, you have to make twelve carrier landings. And David is doing well, too, but on the final landing, something happens, they don't know what, but he's washed out, he's disqualified because of that last landing. And Harvey never knew what happened, I can't find records of what happened. It might be in David's flight log, but I don't have that. I have Uncle Harvey's flight log. But yeah, from that point forward, Harvey's on his own. So with the carrier qual in advance, you're given your wings, your wings of gold. And this is in Pensacola, Florida, so my grandparents are in L.A. and traditionally it's your parents who pin your pilot wings on you. But since they weren't able to afford the trip to get over there, or the time, the admiral did it. I forgot his name, anyway, got a picture of him pinning the wings on Harvey.

And then from there, he went to all weather school where they teach you how to fly a plane in the dead of night just by instruments only. And then if you make that and you're still alive, then you go to just twenty hours of jet flight qualification, twenty hours. And then the jet you're flying is this old... I forgot the name of it... but it's this very early jet that kind of looks like a drone to me. I've seen black and white photos of it. Anyway, he trains in that, qualifies for jet flight school, but you don't land on a, I don't think you carrier qual with a jet. I have to double check that, but in those days, in the Korean War, the Navy was kind of caught flat footed because they had downsized considerably from the end of the war when they had the twenty-four carriers in the water, they had downsized to just eight by the start of the Korean War. So when that conflict broke out, only two carriers reported to the theater where they carried out operations off the carrier decks. But they were World War II carriers so they were straight deck, wooden plank, and not designed for jet aircraft. And these were first generation jet aircraft we're talking about. So they were... the Navy had contracted with different manufacturers to try and find a model that had the flight characteristics needed not only to get the job done over target, but to return, and then to complete the job by landing on this three hundred foot deck. So the model that my uncle was fortunate enough to fly and train in was the F9F Panther. That became the workhorse for the Korean War naval aviators, and he's lucky to be in that one versus some of the other jets, they had these grotesque names because of their flight attributes like Ensign Eaters or I forgot some of the other names.

BN: Ones you didn't want to be on.

JF: Yeah, the ones that, uh-oh. And the accidents that would happen early on, this is from 1950 to '53, you're talking... a plane would hit the deck, and you're talking about carriers that were not equipped with a modern day landing operations assistance apparatus. They still have them by the same location on the carrier deck, but they had an actual person standing on the little platform, the landing signal officer, and he had these two ping pong paddles that would mimic your wave level. And then all these signals that would communicate to you in the cockpit what you should do. And if you had to wave off, he would wave you off. And you had to apply power in order to make another go around. But the jets, that worked fine for the prop planes in World War II and for the carriers, half of the aircraft, more than half the aircraft on board were still prop driven, and they would use those during the Korean War for the bombing. And the jets, though, unlike the props, when you were given the cut signal by the landing signal officer to cut and come in for landing, the jet engines had a turbine that would drive the air compressor at the front of the engine. It was all kind of tied together, and this one tune that you straddled in the cockpit, that was your jet engine. So when given the cut signal, well, yeah, okay, it might stop running for a prop plane, but for a jet, that spindle kept turning for thirty seconds. That meant you still were powering down under the deck, so the accidents that would occur were when the jet hit the deck too hard, bounced over all the retaining wires, still plowed through the, they called it a Davis barrier which was like a tennis net. Of course, it was heavy wire and steel, and so it would just pierce that and then it would crash into all the unused jets that being stored at the opposite end of the deck. So again, it's World War II carrier design is having these conflicts with, jet technology, but that's just still in its experimental stages.

So I don't think, as a pilot, that my uncle Harvey really thought about that. Maybe he knew about those accidents and knew about the possibility, but he never spoke about it. So yeah, to a lot of the instructors there, they would tell their cadets, "What's the problem? It's got a stick and two wings, just get in there and fly it." And so some of the, like his commanding officer Bruce Bell, Lieutenant Commander Bruce Bell, he was in charge of this squadron of twenty-four pilots. And then they had like four divisions, sixteen aircraft, so four aircraft per division. Bruce Bell, Lieutenant Commander Bruce Bell, picked Uncle Harvey to be his wingman. And that's kind of an honor, but I was told that it comes as no surprise to everybody else in the squadron when you're picked as the squadron leader's wingman, because everybody knows who the best pilots are. And my uncle Harvey, just through a stroke of luck, had three months of extra training time in the F9F. So he had felt pretty comfortable in that plane. So naturally Bruce Bell recognizes that, picks him as his wingman, so he flew as, they called it... because of Bell's last name, they called it the Dinger Division. So Bruce Bell, the Lieutenant Commander was Dinger 1, and then my uncle Harvey flew as Dinger 2, and then Dinger 3 and 4.

But yeah, he saved the life of his lieutenant commander late in the campaign. This is maybe July, early July 1953. It was during the period of time during the war where automated aircraft, automated anti-aircraft cannons were being fired. So these were radar-controlled cannons shooting at you. So on one mission that they had to, I forgot, Wonson Harbor or something like that, my uncle Harvey was flying as wingman, which means you're trailing and off to the side of your leader, and your responsibility as a wingman is to make sure he can focus on the task, and in other words, just ensure his safety so that he can do what he has to do. Anyway, these radar-controlled guns began focusing on his jet. And usually the jets were fast enough to outrace these anti-aircraft streams of anti-aircraft cannon fire that were coming up through the air. They had red tracers, so it's like an inverted waterfall of these red tracers coming up, and they're going right for his leader. So he spots where the, on the ground where the fire is emanating from, and he takes a dive straight to them and then begins to fire his twenty millimeter cannon. These cannon shells were cartridges that housed the shell were about as big around as your wrist or a soup can, they're pretty powerful. And then the piece that comes out and is fired at the target varied from fragmentation to armor piercing and whatnot, it would kind of mix it up. Anyway, so he's down there and he's firing his cannon off at the radar assisted guns and now they start moving towards him. Luckily, his charges were on target, so the firing stops and he was given a special recognition for that. The commander of the fleet, a rear admiral at the time, they called him Jocko Clark, who was half Cherokee Native American, there's a photograph of Jocko Clark shaking the hand of my uncle Harvey had an all hands on deck award ceremony where you in the background could see all the crew members. So that was kind of a special deal.

BN: Yeah.

JF: So he stays after the conflict, and he stays in the reserves and keeps flying. He winds up being, he always wanted work that would take advantage of his training and education. So he winds up working for North American Aviation, who are developing the F-100 fighter, and they need someone who can design their bomb release mechanism. So he helps them with that, and then they get bought by Lockheed, I think, and they take on the construction of the Apollo project, the boilerplate of the control module. So he works on that team and designs that Hershey kiss thing. He's assigned to, or he winds up being the leader of the team that designs the safety harness mechanism at the top. Kind of a crucial piece, because if that fails, now you've done everything. If that thing fails, good grief. So that was a lot of responsibility for him, so he feels like, okay, finally, I'm doing what I should be doing.

BN: So we're a couple hours in, so I think we're going to have to wrap up soon. So can we just go part two?

JF: Yes.

BN: I'll be back definitely in June and we'll make arrangements for that. But this is all great stuff. I mean, you're a really good storyteller.

JF: Just telling the truth. [Laughs] I'm lucky that I got to videotape my mother and my dad on an inspired night. They told all these stories, also at our family's get-together, my mom's side of the family used to get together at Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmastime for dinner, and all those Nisei folks used to tell those stories about camp and camp days.

BN: Certain kinds of stories about camp.

JF: Yes, only the good things, the fun things for them.

BN: So many Sansei got only that version of camp.

JF: That was our case.

BN: Okay, very good.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.