<Begin Segment 12>

SO: You know what we didn't do was when you were looking for an apartment...

SS: Right, so... yes. This was before I was going to get married in 1958, I was trying to help us find a place to live and so looking through the classified ads in the newspaper I would pick out certain ones and go and take a look at them and every time I showed up and they answered the door, they would tell me that no, the apartment's already taken and this happened over and over again and I thought that was so strange. So finally on one of them I called back and asked about that apartment again, and they said, "Oh, yes, it's available." So then I knew something funny was happening and I remember mentioning it to my brother Fred and he was just really angry. He said, "To think that here you are teaching in the schools and you're still getting that kind of treatment. So he went with me to this place that had turned me down and the woman who was in charge of doing the rentals, she said that it was her son who was a lawyer who owned the building and it really wasn't so much because of me, but they were afraid of what the other renters would think. And therefore, they didn't want to cause any trouble and they wouldn't rent to me. So when that happened, then what we ended up doing is we put an ad in the paper ourselves and we said, "Nisei couple looking for apartment to rent." And then we waited for the calls to come and that way we found a duplex for ourselves to live in.

SO: I'm kind of surprised that people would know what that meant.

SS: I think we said, "Niseis" but maybe we said, "Japanese American." I can't remember what term we used. We may have used, "Japanese American couple looking for a place to..." Yeah.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.