Densho Digital Archive - Jim Tsugawa Interview (denshovh-tjim

<Begin Segment 19>

AC: Okay, so you were there through high school, and going through Beaverton High School.

JT: Yeah, Beaverton High School.

AC: And you were the only Japanese American, the only person of color, the only minority there at all in the entire school.

JT: Yes.

AC: And everyone just kind of treated you just like one of the guys?

JT: Yeah, one of the guys.

AC: Did you go on dates in high school?

JT: Well, yeah, I did. Most of the time the girls accept, Caucasian, and I could go, there was this one gal that I dated, my buddy would have go to up and pick her up and bring her out to the car and then take off to a dance or whatever, I don't think her parents enjoyed Japanese Americans. But the rest of them, they were just very nice, the girls were. So yeah, I dated a few.

AC: So how did that make you feel when you had to go send your friend to go pick up your date?

JT: That was really different.

AC: How did you even figure that out?

JT: I don't know how we did. Her name was Shirley Siverson, I remember. She was a little short, cute little girl.

AC: And so you liked each other, and yet you knew that you couldn't go to the house.

JT: I couldn't go to the house.

AC: And your friend was okay with saying, "Fine, I'll go get her"?

JT: Yes. And then going back to the eighth grade there, and we lived on Laidlaw, and the grade school must have been maybe two miles away. So I used to ride my bike to school, or walk to school, and then pretty soon I got to meet this lady just about, oh, maybe two blocks from where we lived, and she had a daughter, and she would drive her daughter to school, so they let me ride with them. But otherwise, I had to walk. Then when I hit high school, yeah, I had to walk to, oh, god, about half a mile to a bus a stop to catch the bus to go to school. And then after practice, football, thumb your way, you could get to Cedar Mill, it was pretty easy. At those times, women picked you up, girls picked you up. And then from there, on West Union road, it was a little harder to get rides. And then the area that I lived on, Laidlaw, there was no cars that came there. So that was about a, three quarters of a mile walk to get to the house.

AC: So how long would it take you to get to school, and how long would it take you to get home from practice?

JT: Probably practice, probably forty-five minutes, hour, get out to Cedar Mill, Cedar Hills Boulevard, hitchhike. Then let's see, sophomore year, god, I think sophomore year, some senior would pick me up. Dick Hesselgesser would pick me up every morning to go to school.

AC: Was he a friend of yours?

JT: He was a friend, he was a senior, and he was a football player and so he would pick me up and take me to school. That's right. My sophomore year, Henry, my brother Henry, bought a house in Cedar Mills, so we had a house there.

AC: So tell me about that house.

JT: That house was a cold bugger. God almighty, in the wintertime, there was no heat that went up into the bedrooms. And I guess that was just an oil heating system, no, the rooms upstairs got heated. There were, what, four bedrooms upstairs, and a makeshift shower downstairs. That was kind of cold outside there, but we did have a shower. And we lived there for, yeah, my freshman, sophomore, junior, senior year, yeah. I mean, my sophomore, yeah.

AC: Did it have an indoor toilet?

JT: Oh, yeah, we had an indoor toilet. [Laughs]

AC: So it sounds like through high school you really bonded with the members of your sports teams. They really took care of you.

JT: Oh, yeah. In fact, Alton, just last Wednesday, last Wednesday, the guys that I ran around with, seven of us, we got together for lunch with wives. But of the seven, two are deceased now, but we still get together. The guys, maybe once every two months, we have lunch together, and then try to have the wives get together. So we've really been pretty closely bonded together.