<Begin Segment 7>

SO: What was, when you had summer, when school was out and you were free for the summer, what was a day like?

LK: I must have just hung around with... I remember we used to play Kick the Can with neighbors and just sort of, I don't know, occupied ourselves. I remember going to movies. We used to go to Shirley Temple movies, I remember that, but they must have had double features, because I remember horrible movies like Beau Geste I could still remember the horrible people, the foreign legion in the desert and Les Miserables, I remember seeing that, and those poor people being whipped. Because I know my mother wouldn't send us to movies like that unless Shirley Temple was the feature, I guess.

SO: Did your father own a car?

LK: No, we never had a car.

SO: So did you ever go on trips?

LK: Yes, like I say, friends that had cars, particularly the farmers, Mr. Fujita, I remember he would take us to the Seaside for the day and we would catch crab and we would have this open kettle and we would boil them and just eat them all. We would have razor clams, oh, they were so good. That you have to cook. We would go crab digging and so we did have friends that had cars. And then we always celebrated Thanksgiving and holidays with someone else and our good friend owned a grocery store. But even if he owned a grocery store, you lived in the back, and so you didn't have as many facilities, they didn't even have a bathtub, as I recall. And so they'd come to our place and they would take their baths and stuff. But, so we had some good friends, the Niis, they were our good friends, and we would celebrate Thanksgiving with them.

SO: Where was Seaside?

LK: Seaside is on the coast out of Portland. Oh, it's really, I went back there and it's just like a zoo there. It's like, what is that in California? What's that muscle?

SO: Venice Beach?

LK: Yeah, Venice Beach, sort of like that. So I was a little bit disappointed that it wasn't like what I remembered, the beautiful beach and catching all that. So that was really nice that they would take us. And people took us to Mount Hood, as I recall, so people did have cars.

SO: Did you leave the state?

LK: I never did. I think Esther went to, my sister Esther went to Seattle for some church conferences, so she had a chance to meet some people up there, but we never did.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.