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TI: Over the years, as I became busier, I neglected my family so much that I felt at times that we should take some time and enjoy life with them. So in 1964, we decided that we would undertake skiing as a family event. So we went up to Government Camp one winter day. All the kids, my wife included, we all got skis and flopped around. We were looking like walking ducks. [Laughs] But any rate, all the children enjoyed it, and we began skiing every winter. So it's been -- it's been our practice to go to Sun Valley every January to ski for a week, we took lessons. We then went to the Bend area or sometimes down into Utah and Colorado in February and skied in various resorts. And in March during spring vacation, we always went to Whistler, and I can recall when we first started going to Whistler in the '60s, it was a narrow two-lane gravel road which was highly dangerous because it was so close to precipitous ravines. But nevertheless, all of our family has continued skiing, and I still ski in January over in Sun Valley, and our children have become expert skiers. As a matter of fact, my son became a ski instructor while he was in college. 1962, I began to experience some success, and I presented a gift to my father. I bought him a 1962 Cadillac Coupe. He was so proud of it.

In 1964, we took a trip up into the Puget Sound of San Juan Islands, and prior to doing this, I had taken a course with the, some organization here. I took a course in piloting and navigation, and I charted a 32-foot craft out of Anacortes, and we embarked upon this trip into the San Juans in the Salt Spring Islands. I took my father and my mother's mother, my wife's mother. We all slept on the boat, and my crew was my nine-year-old son. He's the one that jumped off the ship and secured the boat, secured the ship, but we had a great time. We stopped off at various islands. We picked up clams, oysters, did some fishing. I just about had a tragic accident there. We stopped at one of the islands to dig some clams, and I had moored the boat out there off shore, and as we were digging clams, the tide went out. When I looked up, I suddenly saw the ship tilting. I thought, "Oh my goodness, I got to get it into deeper water." So I just barely got the ship, the boat in deeper water and escaped the calamity.

In 1970, we took a trip into Canada. We rented an RV, the children are all small yet so that they were able to sleep in the RV. We first went from here to Spokane, and of course, I had never driven an RV before. It was, as I recall, it was a Dodge. When I left Portland and drove up as far as Pendleton, I notice the gas gauge was low, so I filled up. And much to my surprise, from Portland to Pendleton, it took thirty gallons, and I just couldn't believe I had used that much gasoline in such a short distance. But nevertheless, we went to Spokane and then to Montana, Flat Head Lake, and then we went to Yellowstone and then into Calgary. And luckily, we hit Calgary just at the time they were having the Calgary stampede. And of course at that time, the audience in the stampede, its numbers like 100 to 110,000 people every day, and there is no place to be found for lodging. And fortunately for us, we were able to drive up next to the stadium, park in a rental parking area and stay overnight, and we went into the stampede at nine in the morning, and we didn't get out until midnight. So we had a wonderful time seeing the stampede which was entirely unexpected. From there, we drove on to Banff and saw the beautiful Banff area, saw all the deer and elk. We didn't see any moose here, but we enjoyed Banff and then went to Lake Louise and saw the beautiful area there and hiked up to the falls. After that, we drove up to Jasper and stopped at the Columbia ice fields and stayed in Jasper where we saw all kinds of moose, wild goats, following which we came back down to the Glacier National Park in Canada, then through the Okanogans where we stopped and swam in some of the lakes there, and then finally we came down the Yakima Valley. And at that time, the cherries were in harvest, so we stopped and picked cherries on the way back and enjoyed the fruits. We stopped at the Grand Coulee Dam and finally returned home. That was a memorable trip for the entire family.

Another vacation that we took, my wife and myself, in 1972, we took a tour with the Oregon Medical Group and this was so-called the people-to-people tour, and we went to Europe. We first went to Brussels, and the whole idea of this trip was to contact the physicians in that area and to talk to them about various aspects of medicine, what they were doing, what we were doing, and they were to show us their hospitals and clinics. From Brussels, we then went to Stockholm and had a nice meeting with the local physicians. We toured the city area, and then the next day, we flew to Leningrad. And just before we left Stockholm, our tour leader advised us to stock up on snacks. He says, "You are going to be needing them," and sure enough, we certainly did. We went to Leningrad and stayed in this very large hotel. I think it was something like a thousand-room hotel, and we went to see their museum there. Leningrad is known as a City of Canals; and indeed, there were canals all over the city. From there, we boarded the train and overnight trip to Moscow. You know, during this period in 1972, the Iron Curtain was still up, and as we got into Moscow, we were escorted by armed soldiers to our hotel. We had a tour of the city. We met with the local physicians in a meeting, discussed all kinds of medical, surgical problems. And I still remember that some of the operations they were doing were outdated that we had done some time ago back that were abandoned. They would not allow us to see their hospitals, and so they took us to their clinics which was not too informative. The next tour we went to Warsaw, and I remember at the airport as we walked out to the plane, this was at night, and it was raining, we were escorted by bayoneted soldiers, had bayonets on their rifles, and we were escorted out to the plane. And we got to Warsaw, we saw all kinds of photographs of the mass destruction of the entire city which was just unbelievable. We were able to meet with their physicians and had discussions. They took us to their hospital, and it was very, very old. They had large rooms with, I remember, single beds that were made out of iron posts, narrow beds, and there were many patients in a single room. It was disheartening to see how far behind they were in medicine.

We next went to Prague where the city was a little brighter. People were a bit more open; and as a matter of fact, we went to a restaurant, one of the waiters wanted to buy some dollars, and he would give me black market rates which was kind of interesting. It was a beautiful city, and we certainly enjoyed Prague. We next went to Berlin. We were to have gone to East Berlin first; but for some reason, we were not allowed to go in. We went into Berlin itself; and for the first time, we had a nice hotel where they had accommodations of a bathroom in our room. It was a wonderful change. We had a meeting with the physicians in Berlin and had a very satisfying exchange. One event that still, that I remember was that night that I, we arrived in Berlin, I wanted to take a sauna, and I asked the clerk, the hotel clerk where it was, and so he pointed it out to me, and I went down the hall and went into this sauna. Suddenly, I saw this lady lying on the shelf, and of course, she didn't have a stitch of clothes on. And I thought, oh my goodness, I'm in the wrong place. So I went back to the clerk, and I said, "That's a women's sauna." He says, "Oh no, they are all the same here, so you just go ahead and use it." That was an eye opener. [Laughs] After Berlin, we went back to Copenhagen and concluded our trip. That was quite an eventful trip.

Back in 1976, we went to Hawaii for the first time with our family, and I also took my parents because they had never been there before, and we had an enjoyable time. We went to -- mainly to the Big Island and came home laden with leis and orchids. My wife actually had some relatives in Hawaii, on the Big Island, Hilo, so we met them, and we drove around the entire island. I'm sure my parents really enjoyed the vacation.

Another vacation we had was notable was in 1977. My wife and I and some of our skiing friends decided we will ski in Europe. So we signed up with the tour, tour group, and first went to Italy, to Valgardena and skied there for several days, I think close to a week. And of course, we had heard about Valgardena and how nice it was, and the only thing about it was that we went to this hotel, it is called Post Hotel. We were shown our room, and it was a very small room. And the first thing we noticed that we had straw mattresses, and the bathroom was down the hall, and it was certainly not what we had expected. But nevertheless, the skiing was good, the weather was excellent, and we enjoyed our skiing. Our next stop by bus was to San Moritz in Switzerland, and of course this was a really, a big ski resort. It's open only during the wintertime just for skiing, and they had many fancy hotels. There's a lake right in the center of the village. Of course, it's frozen, but they conducted a horse race on this frozen lake every day, and it was quite an event to watch horse races on a frozen lake with snow on the ice. The skiing was excellent here, and we ran into Warren Miller's filming crew. And it just so happened that particular year, the snow was so poor here on the West Coast that Warren Miller had sent his team over to Switzerland to film the skiing events. They took with them these figure skating champions, or figure skiing champions over there, and we watched them doing their filming. San Moritz was a very luxurious place, and we certainly enjoyed their skiing. It had many mountains to ski on. And finally we finished and flew back to Geneva and back home. So that was our experience of skiing in Europe.

In 1978, I took my parents and one of my daughters, Susan, to Japan, and we met our relatives along with the tour of most of the main Honshu, and I had promised all of my children that someday I would take them all to Japan to see what Japan was like and then to meet our relatives. In 1998, I did the same thing again. This time I took my son Jerry and his wife Jody. Jerry is now an anesthesiologist. He lives in Spokane and works at the Deaconist Hospital, and they thoroughly enjoyed Japan. They took the Japanese cuisine. I think they stopped at every noodle shop in the railroad stations. Again in year 2000, we toured Japan again, and this time I took our oldest daughter Sharon and her son Matthew, who was just eight, and our daughter Lori who is now a nurse, and she lives in Haley just adjacent to Sun Valley, and she took her daughter who was ten. And of course, the grandchildren had a great time. They learned a few things about Japanese youngsters. They would all come up to them and start talking to them in Japanese, practicing their English on them. We met all of our relatives and had a nice tour that extended from Hokkaido down to Kyushu.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.