<Begin Segment 13>

CO: What was it like after you came back to California?

HY: Oh, we stayed at the Evergreen hostel, which was set up to sort of ease our way back into society. And I was lucky to find a house in Boyle Heights, a rental. And so -- also, while I was still at the hostel, I think I found a job with the Los Angeles Tribune, a black weekly, and started working right away. So I guess we were on the lucky side. Because there were piles of people that came to stay with us at one time or another while they were trying to get situated. And Little Tokyo was Brownsville during the war, and gradually the Japanese came back, and I guess a lot of 'em owned the buildings there so they were able to re-establish their businesses and I don't know where the blacks moved to. But gradually Little Tokyo was no longer Brownsville. I recall that Mary Oyama Mitwer had rented her family, family's home to Chester Himes, the Negro novelist, during the war. And he dedicated his book called If He Hollers Let Him Go to the Mitwer kids, or one of the sons, anyway. So I thought that was interesting.

CO: How, how was... I mean, how were you received by the population in Los Angeles?

HY: Okay, I guess. I didn't notice that much hostility. The landlady was happy to rent to us, and she was a Mexican woman, Mexican American woman. And she lives in Oceanside, by the way, retired after her husband died and she re-married and that husband died, too. And oh, going to work on the streetcar and back again, I didn't notice any, anything overt. I definitely did notice a lot of hostility towards the blacks that had come in during the war for war jobs and stuff. So there were probably a lot of people that hated our guts, but I didn't come across any. My father met this man who, a Mexican man, that had been drinking and threatened to stab him because his son had died in the war in the South Pacific or something. And my father told him that he had lost a son, too, and that Japanese and Mexicans had always been great friends, etcetera. And so the man changed his mind about killing Papa -- [laughs] -- so he talked his, talked his way out of that situation.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.