<Begin Segment 8>

AC: What did you do for fun? When you're growing up in high school, you go to Nyssa for dances, did you have dances in high school?

SS: Yeah, but my dad was very strict, he wouldn't let us go. Anyway, I don't think they really wanted the Nihonjin kids to dance with the hakujin kids at that time when the evacuee kids came in. And Mr. Grigg was the bishop at the Mormon church, he started having these dances for us, the Nihonjins, at this LDS little recreation hall. And so a lot of the guys Paul's age would come from Ontario and stuff, and we had a lot of dances at this LDS building. And I don't know... I remember the coach not wanting the guys to date Japanese girls, I remember that.

AC: How did that make you feel?

SS: Huh. Well, I couldn't date anyway, my dad wouldn't let us. [Laughs]

AC: So what did you do for extracurricular activity in high school?

SS: Let's see. Extracurricular, you mean...

AC: Were you part of any clubs?

SS: Well, yeah. JA, I remember riding my bicycle... it wasn't my bicycle, it was my brother's bicycle, clear to Ontario and back, and we got credit for that. I didn't get home until about ten at night. Bicycle clear to Ontario was twenty-seven miles from our home. I don't know... but we had to do things for points to... I forgot what it was for now. [Laughs]

AC: Now during the war they had all kinds of, like, rubber drives and scrap metal drives and all kinds of stuff, war bonds. Did you participate in any of those?

SS: We used to save all our tinfoil, and they were having these balls of tinfoil. Let's see... we used to have savings bonds, yeah. I think at school they used to have these savings bonds drives, we used to all participate. I don't know what we did.

AC: So you met your husband, your current husband, sometime during high school?

SS: Well, he was older, he was around, but I didn't know him. Really he was just part of the community, older guys. But he came back from the service and was on the GI Bill at Oregon State.

AC: So you didn't meet until you were at Oregon State.

SS: Yeah. So I got together with him.

AC: Before, though, how did you feel when the war kind of ended? You were still living here in Ontario?

SS: Let's see, what year was that?

AC: The war ended in 1945.

SS: Oh, I just started college that year, just graduated from high school.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.