<Begin Segment 2>

HH: So you lived in Oakland, California?

HU: I lived in Oakland, California, for the first five years. And then we moved down to Los Angeles when my father started a kamaboko factory, which was a fish cake, fish cakes.

HH: I see. What kind of school did you attend?

HU: Well, I attended kindergarten, then I went to Ninth Street Elementary School, the Lafayette junior high school, and Thomas Jefferson High School. Then I went to, two years to UCLA, and then I finished at UC Berkeley in 1937.

HH: And what did you do after you graduated from Berkeley?

HU: Well, I couldn't find a job. In fact, I really didn't look for a job, because I knew that most Niseis, even if they got a degree, it was very difficult to find a job. So I was working with my father. By that time, he had moved his shop to Terminal Island, and I was working in his shoe repair shop for about a year or so. Then he got me a job working as a fisherman in Terminal Island. Isseis had a lot of fishing boats. So I worked, I don't remember, two or three years as a fisherman.

HH: You mean going out to sea?

HU: Going out to sea.

HH: What kind of fish did you catch?

HU: Well, in the summertime, we caught tuna and mackerel, and then in the wintertime we caught sardines.

HH: I see. And this is all while you were carrying a degree in, was it electrical engineering?

HU: That's right.

HH: And did you use any of that education at all?

HU: Well, then, one of my classmates at Cal Berkeley, he told me that they're hiring some people at the Department of Water and Power in the City of Los Angeles, so I went there and I got a job as an electrical draftsman. And later I found out there was a whole group of them working in another building, working on a new power plant.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.