Densho Digital Archive - Clyde Tichenor Interview (denshovh-tclyde

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KL: Did you start taking classes and sports at the YMCA right away?

CT: I was not interested in any sports but judo, and of course, I wasn't interested in that until I learned about it to understand there was such a thing.

KL: How did you learn about it?

CT: At the YMCA. A French gentleman from France, Gene Elfendari, was teaching a judo class, or martial arts, but it was mostly judo because he had taken judo. He had a brown belt, I think, in judo. And I started to get into his class, as a matter of fact, I was in his class for a week or two. At which point we were approached as a class by a gentleman named Jack Sergil who watched us one evening, and after the class said he also taught martial arts and suggested we might like to come to his class. His class consisted of a building in what had been the Japanese section of town. And it had a large mat area built behind the house, which was a judo club, which he ran. Because this was just about the time the Japanese were being moved out of the city. He was a black belt in the club, and, of course, they turned it over to him, because they had no way to control it with them being gone, so he took it over.

KL: Did he ever talk about that, about being asked to take over the dojo?

CT: It was a natural thing to do, and he was a black belt. He'd been with them long enough so that they awarded him that level. And he used to just come open up the house and we'd go through the house into the back and in the back was the big judo mat which was probably twenty by forty or so in size. And it had sides that you could slide open.

KL: The dojo did, the home one?

CT: Yeah, you could open up the walls by sliding the panels back, which we would do in the summer and stuff, and the winter evenings.

KL: And this was pretty soon after he took it over?

CT: 36th Place on Normandie, approximately. The building's still there.

KL: Oh, wow.

CT: But I don't know whether it was just people living there or what, but it's been so many years.

KL: Was the neighborhood pretty deserted when you were studying judo?

CT: It had been taken over by Caucasians.

KL: Fast, huh?

CT: Yeah, it was to a great extent Japanese, that's why the dojo was there. But they were, of course, at that point, gone. I don't know what they did, they sold and rented in various other ways, but they had to leave the property.