<Begin Segment 3>

HH: Before we do that, so you were born in 1934, and so you went to school in Salinas, California. That's where you were born, in Salinas?

AI: Yeah.

HH: What kind of town would you say Salinas, how would you describe Salinas?

AI: Well, Salinas is a rural town, but it is the, Salinas is the lettuce capital of the United States, of the world. Because if you look at, if you go to any major supermarket and you pick up a head of iceberg lettuce, it'll say Salinas, California.

HH: Even today?

AI: Even today.

HH: So you went to, what grades did you go through prior to evacuation?

AI: [Laughs] I started kindergarten at Lincoln school in Salinas, and as a farm kid I walked two and a half miles as a five year old kid to kindergarten. And to me, as I look back, I said, "Boy, I would never let my son travel, walk that far." And my mother as a child used to do that, walk two and a half miles to school. So I went there, I went to kindergarten, and then during that time, we had to move, my father wanted, I guess my father wanted, I guess, a better farm, so moved about five miles up the road in the same kind of farm, 40-acre farm, something like that, and we raised sugar beets and lettuce there, in a town called El Sal. And then we switched from Lincoln School in Salinas to grammar school in El Sal, which I attended first grade and second grade. And during my second grade is when Pearl Harbor occurred.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.