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VY: Let's see. Oh, did your family go to church during this time?

MM: Yes. Mostly it was... well, Alan didn't go, it was mostly my brother Shoji and I, we walked over to either the Methodist church or the Buddhist church, they gave out candy at the Buddhist church, so we liked going there. But one incident I do remember, when my brother and I were going to, coming here to the Buddhist church, we always had our money that you always get, what do you call it?

CC: Tithing.

MM: They didn't call it that, but it's the same thing. And so it wasn't much, it was just a few coins. But I remember we were walking, and these two kids with a big old German shepherd dog stopped us and wanted our money. I was so scared, and so we came to church. And usually when we came to the Buddhist church, he would go to his place, to his whatever, and I would go pick up my friend who lived right next door, Sandra, and her family, and go pick her up. And I went in there crying and they wanted to know what happened, so I told them. And their parents, the mother and father, whoever, was so upset about it that happened to us and wanted to know if I knew who it was. And I said, well, they go to Bailey Gatzert. And so I remember the next, on Monday, when we went, I had to go to the rooms and see if I could pick them out, which I did. And I'm just surprised I didn't get beat up afterwards when I think about it, when I think back now on it. But they didn't come after me for having pointed them out.

VY: That sounds kind of scary. Were you worried about having to identify them?

MM: No, I wasn't. In fact, it's not until I was a grown up that I realized they could have come after me and got mad that I identified them, but nothing happened.

VY: It just felt like the right thing to do?

MM: Well, I didn't have any judgment about it, they asked me to do it, so I did. It was kind of like that.

VY: Let's see. How about sports? Did you participate in any sports or other activities, go to social clubs, that sort of thing?

MM: No. Growing up, I mostly practiced my violin and otherwise just kind of read. I liked to read, didn't do much sports. I liked to play baseball a little bit, but I think I actually sprained my finger here, it's all bent out of shape, and I think I didn't tell my parents. There were a lot of things I didn't my parents because they were busy. And it's not that they wouldn't want to know, I just didn't want to bother them about it. But basically, I didn't do sports. It's not like I couldn't do sports. I remember when I was at Bailey Gatzert they had those things, I could roll around on them, you know, the bars where you hang your leg over and go around. And I think I was pretty good at whatever. I could do jump rope really easily and I remember when we lived on Twelfth Avenue. We had roller skates, those ones that were metal, made out of metal and you could adjust the thing, you put 'em on your shoes, kind of. So one of my friends and I, we would always, there was a hill right by our house, and we'd go tearing down that hill on our roller skates and turn right before we got to Twelfth Avenue. I think about it, I don't know as a parent if I could let my kids do that anymore, I mean, because Twelfth Avenue is so busy now. But I don't know, maybe it wasn't that busy in those days, but it was one of those things that I remember doing that was halfway like a sport, but it wasn't really.

VY: Did you ever get hurt doing that?

MM: No. But my friend did, she got sepsis or something. She fell and scraped her knee, and she had blood poisoning after that. We don't know if it was from that, but we thought maybe we didn't clean it out well enough or something because she scraped her knee on the sidewalk. But I don't know if that was that, it's just conjecture.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.