<Begin Segment 10>

AH: When you went to school, how far away was the elementary school that you went to?

WY: Well, up until third grade, every day, I used to walk about a mile to go to school right in where I was born. After third grade, we went to Lahaina, that's when we had the bus going, taking us to school and back. So if we missed the bus, we have to walk six miles back to come home. So we try not to miss the bus.

AH: And how did Lahaina contrast with where you were in the village? Was that like a big town?

WY: Oh, yeah, huge town. [Laughs] As far as living like, I remember the first time I went to Wailuku. And when I, first time I went to Wailuku, and I went, see the Wailuku town, I thought, "Oh, boy. What a big town it is." But never did I know that one day I'd be coming to Honolulu, and then I went to, like, New York or... yeah. [Laughs]

AH: What kind of things did you do, I know when you got into high school, you did a lot of sports, obviously, but what did you do as a kid, you and your siblings? What kind of things did you do to sort of recreate? You had the beach nearby and...

WY: Well, we used to, those days, naturally, we didn't have money so we used to get all this, what you call Carnation canned cream and roll it up with paper, and we used to play football with that. All those, and we didn't have any glove. I remember the first time when I played organized baseball for a team in Lahaina, I didn't have a glove or a spike, so they loaned me a glove. And so I was kinda... so when you go over there and you don't have a glove, and all these other guys have gloves, spikes, you know, kind of embarrassing. But you can't do nothing. Even like, I remember, I joined the Cub Scouts and we used to go camping and some of those guys get so much canned goods and things. But myself, we didn't have the kind of things that we could eat and things like that. So when we would cook the rice, the rice is half-cooked. So, we cannot throw it away and get a new one because there's no rice. We have to eat it. [Laughs]

AH: I was in the Bishop Museum, just the branch of the Bishop Museum that's in this particular tower of the Hilton Hawaiian Village, and they had a history of Waikiki, and it was showing the surfing and stuff at Waikiki. And by the 1930s, there was a lot of surfing going on in Waikiki, and there was gigantic redwood boards and other things. In Maui, was there any board surfing going on at the time that you were growing up?

WY: We didn't have that kind of nice boards, but we used to have small little boards that we would go out and surf. And, but, we used to do a lot of surfing in Olowalu.

AH: So there was a lot of surfing at that time.

WY: Yeah. We didn't have those nice boards, you know.

AH: And at that time when you were a kid, what aspirations did you have as to, I mean, we all played with things: "I want to be this when I grow up. I want to be that when I grow up." Did you say, "I want to work in the pineapple fields"? Or, "I want to work in the sugar mill," or what did you say to yourself?

WY: Well, when I was growing up, my grandmother had this radio and sometimes, somehow, they would, you would listen to a Honolulu interscholastic football game, or the Hawaii City League baseball game. And that was a dream for me. I'd say, "Gee, I wish that one day I can play at the Honolulu Stadium." And just two years ago, my brother told me that I told him that one day I'm going to be a professional athlete. And I didn't know I told him that, but when I was growing up, I said, "I want to play at the Honolulu Stadium." And then, that's the reason why when I went to Lahainaluna, my freshman, my sophomore year, after my sophomore year, I went to see my father, I told my father I wanted to go to Honolulu. And my father, since he came to Okinawa when he was seventeen years old, he left Okinawa, came to Honolulu. He told me that, "If you want to go, you go."

AH: Like father, like son.

WY: Yes. So I, so I just packed up some things and I came. And my, the room I was staying, naturally, not that nice. It's just this little room was just about this size, and they didn't have any kind of kitchenette or anything like that. Lot of times -- and I didn't have money a lot of times, and I was a junior at Farrington High School. And sometimes, I couldn't eat, during Christmas, New Year's, I couldn't go home because I didn't have money to travel.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.