<Begin Segment 5>

SF: I want to go back to those kinds of early days for you in Nihonmachi. Where did you go to elementary school and high school?

TS: Well, after we came to Seattle, and shortly after that, I started grade school, and went to Bailey Gatzert School, which is a school up on Twelfth and -- between Weller and Lane. And that was a grade school that was made up, almost 100 percent of Japanese. I remember there was one white girl in one, in the school. And I think there's couple of Chinese.

SF: Everybody else was...

TS: Half a dozen.

SF: Everybody else was Japanese?

TS: Japanese, yeah. That's the way the neighborhood was made up. That was a fairly new school at that time, Bailey Gatzert. Prior to that, there was a Seattle school down on Sixth and between Main and Jackson, you know where -- I don't know what's there. Used to be a Chinese restaurant up there. That used to be the old Seattle School. But that's before my time. But I remember it being there.

SF: At Bailey Gatzert, there was this famous white principal, right? Was Ida Mahone, is that...

TS: Ada Mahon...

SF: Mahon.

TS: M-A-H-O-N.

SF: What do you remember about, about her?

TS: Oh, she was a super person. I mean, very fair, and the kids were well under control. You don't have the things happening that you have today. But I think probably didn't happen in other schools, either. But she was a nice person. And I think even after the war, she kept in contact, during the war and after war, with some of the people that she knew, you know, more intimately.

SF: So she never showed any kind of prejudice?

TS: No prejudice, no. She was really, truly a fair person. I can't... recall one time, she had all the boys meet in the basement. And she stood up in front of all of us, and she shook her finger, says, "One thing you don't, you don't wanna do in this school," she says, "Don't point your middle finger, 'cause that's a bad thing to do." [Laughs] Well, of course, we didn't know what it was. So we learned what sticking up your middle finger was there.

SF: Principal, huh?

TS: Yeah. We, we listened to everything she said. And, I think, I don't know if other boys... I recall going there and getting a ruler on my hand. Hey, that changed my whole life.

SF: What were the relations like among the kids? I mean, you had all these Japanese kids running around together. And, I mean, what -- how do you remember those days? As fun times and...

TS: Oh, there were, yeah. Mostly fun times, yeah. And at that time, there was not much fraternizing outside of your own grade level. In other words, you're a second-grader, your friends are all second-grader. When you were in the third, fourth, fifth -- it just continued all the way through high school. You just, I don't know why that is. But that's the way it was then. We organized our own sports teams and things like that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.