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RB: How about school? Do you have any specific memories that you'd like to share around school? What was the ethnic or racial demographic? Were there other Japanese Americans in your school?

PU: In my school? I think there was one in my high school. Not in my class, I think she might have been the class after me. Oh my gosh, I should remember her name, but I can't. Her father was an artist, and she was kind of a hippie peacenik type girl. And so it's, the high school in West Chester was pretty big, and I remember my class, when we were in the ninth grade, had like a thousand kids in it. And I think maybe like seven hundred fifty or so graduated high school. My senior year, there was me and Bill Wong, that was the Asian contingent in that class. [Laugh] So I did some sports and I was involved in student council and things like that. I was actually elected president of the class when I was a senior. I'm not sure how that happened, but that's what happened.

RB: Do you have any memories from serving as the class president? What did that entail, any activities that you were in charge of?

PU: I remember there were these kind of ceremonial things that we had to do, you know, speeches that had to be given that were highly controlled. And we had like six class officers. And I don't know, I think we were responsible for organizing certain activities for the class. But I don't recall, you know, the details of putting together a prom or anything like that, that's probably not the kind of thing that I would have gotten too involved in. Just because it would not have been something that I would have been good at, like picking a theme and decorations and so on. [Laughs] I'm trying to remember, I think we also got involved. I don't know if it was that year or perhaps a year or two before I was a senior that we got involved in some kind of protest, but it was really about construction of a new school that was being held up by labor disputes, and so we started fussing at the labor unions. [Laughs] Oh, and I remember we actually took some buses to, into the city to go to the offices of the Building and Construction Trades Council to protests that they were, you know, causing this hassle for us.

RB: Do you recall if that was instigated by one of the school administrators perhaps or was this something that the students did on their own?

PU: I mean, if it was instigated, it wasn't something that I was aware of that we were being manipulated or anything. I think we were, had our own interest in the school construction. I think the demographics were such that, you know, there was a big increase in school population around, you know, before and around the time that I was going through the school system. Which kind of benefited us because I know I was in elementary school, I started out at one school. And then before I finished elementary school, we moved to a new elementary school, and same thing on to junior high school. And before we finished that, they opened a new middle school for the district because they just constantly needed more space for kids.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.