<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Now, your dad was really open and generous in welcoming the black congregations to use the property. Did he ever get criticism from the Japanese community by doing things like that?

JU: Well, I think there was probably something subterranean about that. But the total effect is he didn't get kicked out 'til twenty years later. [Laughs]

TI: But do you sense that your dad had to kind of... what's the right word? Be out in front with, like, race relations more so than the rest of the community?

JU: He would be, he would be, yeah. And he would make sure that the black opinion was stated in the ministerial work, too. And a lot of his friends were, well, I went to a school, grade school that was ninety percent black. Now, I went to three elementary schools. The first one I went to was totally white because it was out on the edge of the suburb. And the second school I went to -- and I walked to these places -- the second school I went to was a pretty healthy mixture of everybody, and that's where I was legally assigned. The first one, Dad just walked in with Mom and registered the kids. And so we walked about a mile to get there. So that was all right. But the third school, the rather diverse school became too crowded, and so they moved us, moved the fifth and sixth grades to another school. And in that school, I was about, I think there were about eighty percent black. And interestingly enough, the teachers, the black teachers were at that school. Never had a black teacher in the other schools. And of course, a half dozen of my friends were black. So then going to junior high school, which would (be fed by) all those three elementary schools. The diversity (at my) junior high school, for instance, in Denver, has always been very heavily diverse. I mean, from every, every cultural group. And so the high school also was very diverse.

TI: And how did that work, having such a diverse junior high school and high school?

JU: Oh, I think it was great, because I had friends of every color. And good friends, (my best) friends (were) the two black kids in my Latin class, right. And we'd telephone each other at night, working out the conjugations of amo, amas, amat, you know, that sort of thing. And so we were very close. And, of course, one was gay, and the other (...) was my good friend because we were about the same size. (And) the shortest guys on the basketball team, you know. But we were the best, of course. [Laughs] And yet my neighbor, who was on the same basketball teams, Leroy Love, he was an Irishman, and he was about six feet tall. And so he was the center of the basketball squad. And our job was to bring the ball down, and he did all the scoring. But he was only two blocks away. I picked him up every morning. And the Jewish grocer's son on the other corner just across the street from the church, we would all walk together. He'd pick me up, we'd pick up Clark and Love and Jesse, who was black, we'd all be walking together to school. That's the junior high school.

TI: Yeah, so you grew up in this very diverse environment, you had friends from many different backgrounds, and you said this was great. Can you explain why that was great? I mean, what is it about growing up with these different...

JU: We were completely befuddled by the race thing. That never even crossed our minds that anybody was different. And that, you know, just a few months ago, I went to my sixty-fifth high school graduation. We're all in our eighties, eighty-three, eighty-four. And one of the marvelous things is that everybody there was very diverse. We had a lot of Spanish kids, Mexican kids, and well, there were only eighty-five of us. This is sixty-fifth high school. So, and the guys I played basketball with, one of them was there. Lot of 'em were gone, of course, because many men die in their seventies and sixties, and lot of these other kids were really our very good friends, were very diverse.

TI: And so you had the benefit of doing that, and it was a good experience for you.

JU: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.