<Begin Segment 20>

TI: In 1941, you got married. Can you tell me how you met your wife?

JK: Well, I met her many years before that.

TI: And what was your wife's name and...

JK: Helen Gim.

TI: And so when you said met her earlier, how did you meet her years before?

JK: Oh, well, she was quite friendly with the Japanese girls, the girls here. And there weren't, at that, at that time, there weren't very many "eligible," so-called, girls of that age group. In fact, there might have been a dozen girls of her age that were eligible for marriage. Now, lot of 'em, I often wondered how some of these fellows and the girls, how they got together myself. Like the fellow from Murray that married a gal from Ogden, and the guy and his, and the girl from Ogden marrying some guy from Helper. And it was a matter of getting together to these, what we called intermountain social events that we had here.

TI: So going back to your wife, Helen Gim, what was her family background? How long had her family been in the United States?

JK: Well, her father and, they were restaurateurs. He had a restaurant in downtown Salt Lake, and he died, he died when she was, I think she was about thirteen or fourteen, and she had two brothers and a sister, and she was orphaned by the time she was fourteen years old. And I think she was taken care of by the state Family Service Society that placed her in a family home.

TI: But I'm curious, so were her parents immigrants?

JK: No, her family, her mother and father were Chinese, but they were married in Seattle, but they were both American-born.

TI: So she was kind of like a third-generation, almost Sansei...

JK: Yeah, she was like a Sansei.

TI: And so I'm curious, you showed me a picture earlier of a JACL national convention, 1940, and your wife was in that, that picture.

JK: Yeah.

TI: So she would go to Japanese American, sort of, events and functions?

JK: Yeah, she was with the JACL group that went to that Portland convention.

TI: Okay. So you got married in 1941, and tell me in terms of children, how many children do you have?

JK: I had, I've had five. My daughter was born in '44, and Kim was born in '45, and I have one that's a lawyer now, he was born in '50, and there is one that's a cinematographer for television, and he was born in '5-, let's see, '52, and then Craig, the last one, was born in '59.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.