<Begin Segment 20>

RP: Now, how did you meet your wife Miyo?

FN: Oh, I was going to, when I was delivering the flowers and selling to her mother used to have a florist shop on Las Feliz there. And she wasn't working there. She was working in downtown someplace I guess. And I finally met her. I don't know how it started but I met her and start dating her. And at that time I didn't have much money either so her mother noticed that I had the same slacks on whether I went on a date or on a work. I had two pairs of slacks. I had to wash it and press it before I went on a date and her mother's sharp. She noticed it. "He doesn't have much clothes."

RP: Mothers always notice those kinds of things.

FN: Huh? I guess so. But she liked me. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to stick around. And she and my sister were always running the shop. And her husband was still alive. And my wife was working downtown someplace. And then they had to move and they got to this place and my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law, and her husband started a flower shop right here.

RP: You mentioned coming out of Manzanar that there were, it was the same situation in a way that it was before the war where employers didn't want to hire Japanese Americans.

FN: Yeah.

RP: Did you have any difficulties eventually in locating housing as far as discrimination in various communities?

FN: I don't know. My folks had a house so I mean I didn't have to do any house hunting like that.

RP: How about after you were married?

FN: My sister-in-law and her husband had a place out in Burbank so we had no place, got married and no place to go or stay so they let us have her place. And she moved in with my mother-in-law. Yeah, that's how it was.

RP: What did your youngest brother, Dick, do after camp?

FN: Oh, let's see... I don't remember what he did but he, he's the only one that went to college in our family.

RP: Do you know where he went? What school?

FN: Roosevelt. I don't know what he was doing.

RP: He received a scholarship from USC?

FN: Yeah. He got... oh, he played basketball. Yeah, that's right. And then he went to Salt Lake and he met his wife there at Salt Lake.

RP: And he was also the first Japanese American during the 1950s to pay collegiate basketball.

FN: Yeah, uh-huh. For USC.

RP: So he broke some barriers too.

FN: Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, when he was playing basketball there were no colored people at all playing for SC. There was one or two for UCLA. But after my brother graduated, then the black people... just about all black people after that playing basketball. But when he was playing there wasn't a single black people in the, on the team. So he was a little over six foot but he was tall then. And then when the black people came they're all around six-and-a-half-foot to seven-foot.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.