Densho Digital Archive - Kitako Izumizaki Interview (denshovh-ikitako-01-0023)

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MA: So tell me about your, your children. You have three?

KI: Yeah. My oldest daughter, she went to, she went to, first -- both of my daughters went through Cabrillo, and then my oldest daughter, she went to Santa Barbara. She stayed one year, and she was working to make some money during the summer picking berries. And then one day she stood up in the ranch and says, "I'm not going." And I said, "Where aren't you going?" she says, "I'm not going back to Santa Barbara," she says, "I want to go to Berkeley." And I said, "Well, gee, it's too late to." And she says, "Well, I don't care. I'll stay at home six months, and then I'll go," and she did, and she graduated out of Berkeley. And then she went to... oh gee, Monterey, that college where they have all these foreign languages, she took a crash course in Spanish. Because by the time she got out of school, you have Spanish, you have to have Spanish or something, and then she got a teacher's credential, she's been a schoolteacher. Then she moved to England, she had a, she had met her husband-to-be in Berkeley, anyway. And the problem with that was, you know, it's the days of marijuana, and I think he had a little bit too much, and he climbed a tree and fell out and hurt his spine. And he being young -- I don't think he was twenty-one yet -- they couldn't operate on him until he got his parents' permission or something, something crazy like that, and they didn't put him on a board and strap him down, and so I think his spinal cord got severed and then he was paraplegic. Then he went back to England, and then she went to England and stayed with his family for a while and then they, and at the age of thirty, she decided that she's gonna get married to him. So I says, "Well, you're not twenty-one, and you ought to know which side of your bread's got the butter, so I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna say, 'Don't do it.'" But I says, "You better think twice." But her father told her, "Well," he looked at that guy and he says, "well, you could come home any time you feel like it." But he was a smart person, but being Syrian, opposite of, opposite of... anyway, your, lot of Nihonjins, they marry, what do you call it? Israelites...

MA: Oh, Jews?

KI: Jews, yeah, but she's marrying a Syrian, his family comes from Syria. And his father was, worked for the CIA and stuff, and I thought, "My gosh." But anyhow, they got married anyway, and she stayed married to him for twenty years, but there, she says, "Gee, there's no future," she's getting older and older, and she can't handle all the heavy work of moving him around and all that, although he is capable of doing -- and he's a very smart person. They had a macrobiotic restaurant, and he had written cookbooks, and he had a great big natural food store, I mean, you know, very capable. So my husband says, "Oh yeah, he's okay," so he didn't worry. And she's been divorced now for almost... let's see, she was divorced at fifty-something, and now she's sixty-two, so about ten years.

MA: What about your other daughter? What's her name?

KI: Oh, Chris. Well, she, after Cabrillo, she went to San Francisco State, and she got her degree in social work, and she hated it. But I don't see why she didn't change her major, but she just hated when you have to go and do your, whatever you have to do, an aside to get your... and right away, as soon as she got it, she walked out and she got herself a job at the telephone company. And after she worked there for a while, she hated that, oh, she hated that, so she says, "God," so she says, "Oh, I'm going to go find myself another job," and she got a job at United Airlines. And she stayed there for thirty-five years, and so she took early retirement when they started to have a lot of problems with United Airlines. And then so she spends all her retirement days helping watch her grandchildren who are eight and ten now, see, so I'm a great-grandma. [Laughs]

MA: And then your son, Henry?

KI: Oh, yeah, Henry's the last one. And he, he was a funny -- I mean, he was very active when he was young, very different. I used to call him my little "Jap Jew," because he used to be a yo-yo champ, and he'd come and, come through my work, get all my crochet threads, and he'd measure 'em out and he'd sell 'em to all his friends. And with that money he'd go to the store and buy store ones for his own yo-yo, you know. He always was a little different. Anyway, he went directly from high school to Hayward State, and then he went to San Francisco State, and I think he was, was he treasurer of San Francisco State or something? Anyway, he was handling... and then he went to, oh, he went to Lone Mountain College. He didn't get a B.A., but he got his master's. I don't know how he did it, but he did it. He's had a very wild, interesting life.