<Begin Segment 5>

EG: What did you do outside school, as a kid?

FF: Outside school?

EG: Yeah.

FF: Oh heck, I don't know.

EG: Did you have friends out of school?

FF: Oh yeah, no.

EG: What did you do with your spare time?

FF: Well, we used to... well, I don't know. We used to get out and play games with the neighborhood kids, of course. And I can remember, really, as a kid, I was -- gosh, it's something you can't do anymore. But I can remember many times we used to, just a couple of us would get together and we'd jump on the streetcar. And I can remember riding all the way out to, well, the area around Sears Roebuck there. That area used to be all kind of swampy. And we used to go, like catching polliwogs and catching stickle-backs and junk like that. That, that used to be a lot of our activity. I mean, that whole area, aside from the ponds, used to be Hooverville.

TI: Hooverville, meaning the sort of the temporary places where...

FF: Yeah, the homeless.

EG: Shacks.

FF: Yeah, the homeless of that time. I mean, it's not like the dinky population you see there now. There were whole cities of these paper packing crate houses where people lived at that time.

TI: When you went to this area, who were the buddies you went with? Were they Japanese Americans or were they a mixed group in the neighborhood?

FF: Some were Japanese Americans, but I used to have one next-door neighbor, his family was Finnish. And there used to be a lot Finns in this area that were involved in, mostly in fishing or lumbering. Mostly in lumbering. And he was one of them. The name was Luka. And I remember that kid and I, we used to go around a lot.

EG: Organized play of Little League baseball and that sort of stuff, was not a big thing then?

FF: Well, there was, there was a Courier League, but I wasn't involved in that. I used to mess around in the sandlot, whatever, but I never was involved in that.

EG: But you made your own recreation as kids, for the most part.

FF: Oh yeah. And...

TI: What were the ways that you were connected more with the Japanese community? Was it through church or other activities, social events?

FF: Gosh I... we used to hang around a lot, and you know where Collins Play Field is? I used to go there a lot. So the guys, I knew lots of guys that hung around that area, like the Hatas and you know, "Beans." [Laughs] All those guys used to hang around that same area and stuff. I knew those guys, but I don't know...

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.