<Begin Segment 11>

RP: Let's go back to the, the second home. Where did you go next after you left Wilma's? Where were you placed?

CT: Okay, I went to Jessie M. Bloom and it was, she had children with disabilities, physical and emotional problems, so they thought that would be a good home for me. But Jessie M. Bloom was a lovely, lovely person. She was wonderful, and I still didn't bond with her, but she was fair and that's all a kid needs is fairness. And I made my best grades there and was ambitious and all that, but I misbehaved. I was running all over L.A. [Laughs]

RP: You were out walking around and running?

CT: Oh, I was running all over L.A. I went to Thomas Starr King Junior High School and I liked the school, liked the kids and I was just beginning to get on my own where there was a, begin to have a lack of prejudice against the Japanese people, but they, but I was removed from that home because I was too much for Jessie to handle. I was.

RP: So you were the only Japanese child in the home?

CT: Yeah. The others were Caucasian, but I had fun with those kids, too. One had epilepsy, one had TB of the spine, so they had a lot of physical disabilities and I was just too much to handle.

RP: Were they kids your age or younger?

CT: No, they were a little older.

RP: A little older.

CT: But I remember Aunt Jessie when I came to her house, the first thing she did was curl my hair, 'cause she had heard about this, the background, so she says, "I'm gonna curl your hair." And she was just lovely. She was a nice person. I just feel sorry I was so...

RP: So wild?

CT: So wild. I was wild. We used to visit the hobo camps and all that with my girlfriends and talk to them, hop trains.

RP: You did?

CT: Oh yeah. So I was just too wild for her. But I continued my hopping trains at the Nitakes', but they didn't know it. [Laughs] Yeah.

RP: [Laughs] Oh, wow.

CT: Yeah, they didn't know it at all.

RP: So that kind of, what else kind of captured your imagination about life? At that time you're thirteen or so.

CT: Well, when you're thirteen, I was at the Nitakes', then I start settling down because for some reason the kids liked me and I was very popular in school, so I held vice president or held cheerleader and all that and these were all elected offices, and everybody came from the same background because this was after World War II and nobody had any money. And I remember years later when I was working with some young girls, they said, "Well, you can't be popular in high school if you're not rich." And I said, "No, that's not true." Course, I wasn't thinking that they're twenty years later. All this came later, all the materials and all that came later and the importance of it, I should say, came later. But when we were in school all of us were gettin' over World War II, so there was no competition of material things and material things was not the least bit important, and so I was able to hold office or do whatever, have fun and, and be one of the big wheels on campus.

RP: Sort of create an identity for yourself.

CT: And so that became my family. That became my family; my peers became my family, so whatever anything else happened in the home, which was not bad, it didn't matter to me. I was indifferent to the home, indifferent to the foster home.

RP: So Aunt Jessie was a, was a great antidote to Wilma?

CT: Oh, gosh yes.

RP: But you were just a little too much for her to handle.

CT: I was too much, and I admit that was my... but you go on.

RP: And where was Aunt Jessie's home located? Was it also in Los Angeles area?

CT: It, you know where Elysian Park is?

RP: Uh-huh.

CT: Yeah, in that area. Yeah. She had, she had a nice home on a hill and I remember in the backyard was a big hill of ivy, and so it was very, very adventurous.

RP: You must've been close to a train track. You said you visited the hobo camps.

CT: Yeah. I don't know if, I don't remember the hearing of the... but these hobos --

RP: Tell us about them.

CT: These hobos were not what you have today.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.