<Begin Segment 9>

MN: Now, you had all the memories about going to White Point also. Can you share those memories?

MO: White's Point was -- we always called it White Point, but it's actually White's Point -- and that was sort of the Japanese beach. And on bad days, we'd see raw sewage floating around. On good days, you could look at the tidal pools, and it was fun. It was fun. Because you got to go to the ocean, you got to play in the water. I don't recall how frequently we went, maybe three or four times. Certainly not more than that. But it was where the Japanese community went on weekends, and usually it was a Sunday or Saturday. Because a lot of the farmers didn't take Sunday off because Sunday night was market, they had to go to market, deliver the produce. Yeah, they now pronounce it "praduce," but we always called it produce.

MN: Can you share with us who Mrs. Ely was?

MO: Mrs. Ely was one of my high school teachers, she was an English teacher. And we always suspected that she'd just been let out of the insane asylum. And I had her for only one semester. And one of the guys I grew up with, the family was a prominent family in San Fernando, Meduno family, they owned a beer franchise, and they were all football players. And Vito was not a good student, actually he was less than mediocre, he was actually dumb. [Laughs] But in those days, at the end of the semester, you went up to the teacher's desk and you handed them your report card and they'd sign it. [Laughs] And Vito would go up there and he'd have tears in his eyes. "Miss Ely, you got to give me a passing grade. My father will beat me, I won't be able to play football." And the rest of us, we'd really try not to laugh. [Laughs] And it was so funny, and finally she would be in tears and she'd be signing it, and Vito would get a D. But the other times, I had... Fanny Crow was my English teacher, and she was a really good English teacher. But for some reason, when I first went to San Fernando, it was in the middle of a semester.

MN: This was after the war years, right?

MO: What?

MN: This is after the war?

MO: After the war, yeah.

MN: Wait, let me ask you a little bit about Emerson then, Miss Clayton, let me ask you about Miss Clayton.

MO: Oh, "Mean Mrs. Clayton"?

MN: Yeah, tell us about her.

MO: Oh, Mean Mrs. Clayton was my fourth grade teacher, and she would always send me out of the room every day to go to the office to run the mimeograph machine which had to crank three times to get one piece of paper through. And I used to think, one day I asked my mother later on, "How come she sent me?" She says, "You'd get finished with your work so quickly, that you would create problems." I said, "I don't remember creating problems." [Laughs] Anyway, that's Mean Mrs. Clayton, she was my fourth grade teacher. And then when they closed our school we go to Ralph Waldo Emerson up the hill. Get into the classroom in fifth grade, and there she is. Mean Mrs. Clayton is now my fifth grade teacher. And so I'm telling all my friends that we had Mean Mrs. Clayton, I think they had two fifth grade classes. Because I remember my friend Marlon, he was from Oklahoma, and Ray, were not in my class. They were in the other class, which may have been the class of lower achievers, I don't know. Recently I was looking at the picture of my fifth grade class. And the Chinese kid's not in there, he must have been absent that day.

But, yeah, and then my recollection of Mean Mrs. Clayton was that after the war broke out and we were told that we had to go to Manzanar, and the day before we left she called me up to the front of the room and she wanted the class to say goodbye to me and me to say goodbye to the class. And she gave me a book. It was Huckleberry Finn. I still have that book somewhere. Then she kissed me. The most embarrassing moment of my life, absolutely. Japanese parents didn't kiss their kids in those days. I had a hard time overcoming that, because I remember people I knew in the class would kind of make fun of me. "He's teacher's pet," that sort of thing. And then later on, I guess I must have been, after I got out of the army and I went and visited her. She wasn't that old, but she was so happy to see me. But she remembered me from that time.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.