Densho Digital Archive - George Matsumoto Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 6>

KP: So you already told us a little bit about Pearl Harbor, and one of the interesting things that you said, you were kind of informed, you knew where Pearl Harbor was.

GM: Oh, yes.

KP: Sounds like you were working all the time, so, I mean...

GM: Well, I was, there was a library just a block and a half from our original home, and all my, my schoolmates, they were all single child during the Depression, I guess. So they were very precocious and they were reading adult books when they were in grammar school, and they used to drag me to the library and I got interested in reading all these sea stories and different places and history kind of interested me. So here I was in junior, in grammar school and junior high, readin' all about the world history and all this kind of thing. It was interesting to me.

KP: Did you ever go to movies growing up?

GM: Oh, yes. Next door to our concession was the Dome Theater originally, and that was a big deal for us kids. For a dime you could get in on a matinee. They, they have two movies and about three short features, you know, oh, Buck Rogers, this kind of thing, serials. And on the way out they used to give you a Milk Nickel, (ice cream bar on a stick), just to get you out of the door. So we used to go there all the time. And then --

KP: Did they show newsreels there, too?

GM: Oh, yeah. Newsreel, that was a part of the package. They had a feature film and then they had a B-rated film, and then a couple of serial comics, comic book writers, I remember, Tarzan and these kind of thing, and then a newsreel comes on.

KP: Can you remember watching any newsreels about what was going on with Japan and China?

GM: Oh, yes.

KP: What did you think about that?

GM: Well, when I was a kid I didn't think anything of it. I was, oh well, always fighting, but I remember reading about the 1933 incident and when I was a kid, after school, I used to sell papers. There was a boardwalk from Ocean Park pier to Santa Monica pier. It was a mile, and at the foot of the Ocean Park pier there was this newsstand and this news guy would give me twenty papers or something, Times and there was the Herald, Examiner, there was Evening Outlook, Santa Monica Evening Outlook. It's defunct now. But I used to have a stack like this and I would walk down the boardwalk and sell paper to the people that's sittin' around. And there were little stores along the way, and this one guy, oh, there were more than one, would say, "Hey, come here." Said, "Give (you) a penny. Let me read the paper and you pick it up on the way back." And I'd say, "Oh, sure," because they lightened my load, so I'd leave it and he would read the paper. He knew (...) it took me so long to get to Santa Monica and come back, so by that time he had read it and it was all neatly folded and I would return. If I didn't sell it then you could return it, so that was a good deal for both of us.