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LG: So, as a child, you said your parents were connected to JACL? How soon did you get connected to the Philadelphia chapter?

TM: Well, at Germantown Friends School, the woman who was in the development office, her name was Betty Endo. And Betty was one of these wonderful people who, you know, she welcomed me into the community, and she says, "Oh, you must come to JACL." Well, I knew JACL, I just hadn't been active since my family leaving Auburn. And so I knew it, and I thought, well, this is a good way to get connected. So probably in that first year, it must have been like 1977 by the time I got, was probably on the board, and I think the next year I was president or something like that, was a little quick.

LG: Yeah, that does seem quick.

TM: Yeah. But that's the process. [Laughs] You get fresh energy, right, and you put them to work.

LG: So what sort of work did you do?

TM: You mean in JACL? Well, at that time, what was big was called Folk Fair. And in the Civic Center here, they had what they called Folk Fair, and I think it was Nationalities Service Center. Japanese Americans, or JACL worked with Nationalities Service Center early in the time that many of them came to Philadelphia, and Folk Fair was all these different cultures getting together and selling their food and doing dance and songs, et cetera. It was kind of like what we were you doing in school, what my class was doing. So JACL was very involved in that, and so we did that. And we know there were always JACL things, like we had Eastern District Council, which we were involved in, so we had to host it once a year. We had a convention, and I was more active then, and in we had lots of activities in the JACL, so our calendar was very full.

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