<Begin Segment 16>

AH: You know, you've been telling me some things that makes me wonder why you transferred from Lahainaluna to Honolulu and to go to Farrington, because you have good crowds, and you had a good team, and you were competitive with these other teams and sometimes beat 'em, sometimes lost. Why did you go to Honolulu?

WY: Because I wanted to play at the Honolulu Stadium. That was my dream when I was a kid, and that's the only reason why I came to Honolulu; I wanted to play at the Honolulu Stadium. But never did I know, after that, that really opened doors for me to come to Honolulu, because then I had a chance of playing for the 49ers or playing baseball. See, when you play in Maui, you don't get exposed too much. People don't watch you that much. But you come to Honolulu, now, there's more scouts, more good coaches. They watch you and they might give you a scholarship, go here and there. But at that time, when I first came to Honolulu, my dream was just to play football at Honolulu Stadium.

AH: And you even came to Honolulu not too long after Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

WY: Right, yeah.

AH: And so weren't your parents worried about you coming over to Honolulu?

WY: Not my father. My father, when I told him I wanted to come to Honolulu, he told me, "You want to go, you go." And I guess, he coming from Okinawa at seventeen years old, so he didn't think anything of it, I think.

AH: And how did you support yourself when you were in Honolulu when you enrolled in Farrington?

WY: Well, my father sometimes used to give me some spending money and things like that. And my friend, the friend that I used to stay with used to give me spending money and things like that. But there's many a times that I didn't have money to eat. Like during Christmas or New Year's, I wanted to go back to Maui, I can't go because I don't have money and things like that. And lot of times, Christmas, New Year's, everything in town in Honolulu, all the restaurants are closed, so I have no place to eat. But I went to, my junior year was the roughest time in my life, I think. And then my senior year, when you start playing football, you start making friends. So your teammates ask you to come to their house or you get invited out and things like that. So my senior year was much easier for me.

AH: Well, it must have been much more fun for you, too, because your junior year you didn't get to play any sports.

WY: Right.

AH: So what did you do during that time, concentrate on studies or what?

WY: No, no. What I did was, see, our days, just about the war days, so they had two, two shifts. Farrington, the triple hospital took over Farrington High School. So, we were staying in the back, just like a chicken coop where they have Quonset huts where all the classes were there. So, we stayed there and we started to play football and all that -- work out right over there. So, it wasn't that bad.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2003 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.