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LT: And your parents married on March 27, 1938. Your father was seven years older than your mother?

TT: Uh-huh.

LT: Okay, and he was thirty-five, so she was twenty-eight. So what can you tell us about your father? What was he like?

TT: You know, they were really kind of a neat couple because they were so different. So we were able to have two really different ways, and yet, both of them pushed us hard. My dad always felt like we could be anything we wanted, and when other fathers were saying to their children, "You need to look about getting a decent job and having a family," my father was saying, "What would you do if you could do anything you wanted?" And he was a dreamer, and so he always thought outside of the box. And I give him credit for pushing us farther than I think maybe we would have gone. And he loved it, he loved music, so he made sure that even though we didn't necessarily play, that we had music around us all the time, and dance, and the cultural part of a lot of it came from Mom, because she did like the theater, and because of her dancing and ballet, so we got a nice mix. But both of them were very bright, but I know my father was really smart, really smart. He could take a -- maybe today everyone can do it, I'm very bad at math -- but he could take, like, a line of digits where there were five in a row, five across, and like six or seven, and he could do it like this and give you the answer. I don't know if he was faking me; he could have been. [Laughs] But to me, especially when you're not very good at numbers, it was, like, amazing. So I always thought he was a genius. And he was very, very good-hearted, he laughed all the time, he seemed to enjoy life. And they worked long hours on their feet in the store, and I can remember thinking, "Man, how can they do this?" But he was always so happy to be down there with people. And even though it was long hours and all of this, he just was a very good-natured guy, and he was a thinker, a dreamer, too. He thought way outside of the box. He talked about the book he wanted to write and he never wrote, and I think he never wrote it because he felt if he wrote it he would die. But was the concept that he felt that we as a nation needed to come together in small groups, whether we did it around... he had suggested schools, 'cause schools are in every neighborhood and not... you don't have to be a Buddhist or a Christian or a Catholic or whatever. So the school would be the center, and he really felt like it should be open almost twenty-four hours a day. So that there would be people there if you went to work and your child had nowhere to go, the child could be there, old people during the day when no one was home could be there. And so he visualized this as the, to him, utopia, and it would all be centered around the school. I've always just found it fascinating, because we're doing some of it, not as much as I'd like. But he talked about the fact that kids, of course, wouldn't get into trouble because they'd always have people around, so we don't have the kids wandering the streets and everything. But that was something I can remember. He was just such a dreamer, and he thought about stuff that no one else did. We're thinking about it now, of course, what, twenty years after he passed away.

LT: What about your mom? How would you describe her?

TT: She was far more assertive than I think anyone would ever guess, because she looked the typical little Japanese beautiful thing, she always wore these big hats and everything, she looked fabulous. But, man, she was more driven than I would have realized. When she, when Dad finally retired she decided she wanted to go back into nursing. She had to take a class in chemistry, and this is like when she was, I'm sure, sixty-three, and I think of myself when I was sixty-three taking chemistry. And she worked so hard to make sure she got finished and was able to get her class, pass her class in chemistry so she can go back and nurse. And she was extremely athletic, she did a lot of hiking and she made sure she exercised, she stayed extremely fit. So she was an oddity, I think, for her generation. She was a thinker, she was a doer, and she loved all the cultural stuff, so she gave us a little difference. And yet they kind of overlapped because Dad was real athletic, too. So we played softball from the time we were kids, we all took swimming and gymnastics and we skied together and all of that. So it was a nice blend of people who seemed so different, but I think maybe were more alike than I think.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright &copy; 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.