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RP: And where did you attend school?

MK: Grammar school was Jean Parker. And it's still standing there on Broadway and Powell Street.

RP: Huh. Is it still an active school?

MK: Yeah. And junior high was Francisco Junior High. And that was on, in, deep in the heart of Italian-town, in North Beach. And then high school was Galileo. I finished up my senior year in Topaz, Utah.

RP: In Topaz, Utah. So did you get, you know, with Italian friends and acquaintances, did you get introduced to that culture pretty...

MK: Because you had, you were, you moved from class to class more or less as a group anyway. The schools were small in that, in those days.

RP: Right.

MK: Yeah. And so, you know, we didn't socialize to the extent that we went to their homes that much. I remember going to my Italian girlfriend's house. And so I learned a lot about Italian people from her but... I don't think... I think maybe parents were a little more strict about what you did after school. You didn't run around and go here or go there. Well, we had, Monday through Friday, we had Japanese language school anyway. So it's just Saturday, Sunday that we would be going anywhere, like church on Sunday and things like that.

RP: What was your attitude towards language school?

MK: It was fine. I think the only thing that bothered me is that we had all the same teachers and they expected us to excel in the same way that my older sisters did. And then that was a little bit hard to put up with. But you know like if they got A's they expected me to get all A's and things like this. I did make the honor roll but still...

RP: That wasn't good enough?

MK: I wasn't too enthused about all this, but I think the teachers were more ambitious for the students in those days. The classes were smaller. They could work better with the smaller classes.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.