Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Clyde Tichenor Interview
Narrator: Clyde Tichenor
Interviewer: Kristen Luetkemeier
Location: Independence, California
Date: March 23, 2012
Densho ID: denshovh-tclyde_2-01-0002

<Begin Segment 2>

KL: But you moved to Los Angeles.

CT: Pardon?

KL: But you moved to Los Angeles, tell me how that happened.

CT: Yes, my brother, my brother had a job driving cars for a company that was transporting up to the West Coast. Instead of putting them on trucks, they would just pay somebody to drive over to the West Coast. So he ended up in Los Angeles after doing that, and then went over and saw Hollywood and became so excited about it that he decided to move the family. And since my father died when I was eight, he was sort of, partly a titular head of the family and talked my mother into leaving. And so we left when I was probably about thirteen.

KL: Do you remember those conversations, what he told you and your mom about California? What did he like?

CT: My brother?

KL: Uh-huh.

CT: My brother was an extremely talented artist who had somewhat of a superiority complex. And otherwise he was a very personable person, and he was sort of a semi-father to me. Because when he had a car and could drive, I was still riding bicycles, and so I, as a matter of fact, I couldn't get a license at that age to drive a car, so it didn't matter. I remember he had a Pontiac that was a very pretty-looking car at the time.

KL: When he came back from California, was it the art that he liked or the weather or Hollywood?

CT: The weather, the weather. And I guess the Hollywood scene, although he did not get any association with the movies. Actually, I guess I did more than he did.

KL: Did you think it was a good idea when he started talking about...

CT: Oh, yeah, of course that was something exciting to a kid that age. And my mother and I took the train to Los Angeles. He had a car and so he drove to Los Angeles and met us when we got there. And it was a wonderful experience. It seemed like the people were so much more friendly, and you had the warm weather most of the time, a wonderful climate, and it was just an experience you have to live through to really appreciate.

KL: So you liked California right away?

CT: Yes.

KL: Did your mom, too?

CT: She adjusted well to it. She had a lot more friends in from church and stuff in Chicago, but she adjusted to it and enjoyed the weather, too.

KL: Did you live near Hollywood?

CT: We lived in Hollywood part of the time.

KL: And how... so you moved to Los Angeles and you started getting involved in judo after you moved?

CT: Yeah, I guess when you get to be a certain age as a boy, you think in terms of self-defense. And from Chicago we very definitely thought in terms of self-defense because the neighborhoods are very segregated there, and if you're out of your neighborhood, you're very likely to get into an ugly situation with other kids there. Los Angeles wasn't that way, it wasn't segregated that way, you could just about wander anywhere and not have problems like that. But we spent, the kids I was with, we spent most of our time in Griffith Park.

KL: With what?

CT: At Griffith Park, which was, as they said, it's a cross between a wild park and a golf course, which was very manicured. It was irritated golfers on it.

KL: What was your school in Los Angeles?

CT: The school?

KL: In Los Angeles, in Hollywood.

CT: The one that I went to I think was Parkside elementary school at first and then to junior high.

KL: And when you moved to California you were in high school, right?

CT: Junior high.

KL: Junior high, okay. What junior high school did you go to, do you remember?

CT: No, I don't remember that one anymore. Oh, Thomas Starr King I think was the name of that school. It wasn't a high school, it was junior high. That's where I moved to. And then after I finished junior high, then I went to Marshall High School, John Marshall High School.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.