2) Living In Long Beach

Before I was born Mom and Dad shared a little apartment with my Aunt Berna and her first husband Warren Terrill. They didn’t have a sink, so they washed their dishes in the bathtub. One of their most “memorable” meals was one breakfast after Berna had shaved her legs in the bathtub, and then washed the dishes. The menu? You guess it – eggs, brains, and hair.

It wasn’t long before Mom and Dad moved out of the apartment and into a little trailer in a Japanese American displacement park. This became our home for the first year of my life. The trailer park only had one bathroom for about 25 trailers. There wasn’t any hot water and the trailer had one bed in the kitchen if you put the table down and a sofa that made into a bed. They slept on the sofa. One evening it caught fire. They couldn’t get it out the door so they had to chop it up and shove it out. Sometime during the night it reignited and the whole trailer park lit up. After that, they slept on the little table bed.

Again from Dad’s life story:

“Around thanksgiving 1947, we moved out of the trailer into an apartment at 2359 West 20th St Long Beach. This was a lot better than the trailer and was only eight dollars more a month. And we had stepped up in the world, we had an inside toilet.”

When Mom was pregnant with me she baked a chocolate cake for Dad, but decided to sneak a piece of it before he got home. Before long, since she was “eating for two,” she had eaten the whole cake, so she baked another one and helped Dad eat it after dinner.

Since Mom was only 17 years old when I was born, she didn’t know much about motherhood, and although she tried her best, she sometimes felt like a failure. One time she was bathing me on the tiny counter next to the sink in the little trailer. She turned for just a moment to get a diaper after drying me off and immediately heard me crying. I had rolled off the counter and onto a bunch of bottles of homemade root beer. She thought she’d killed me, but I had a tough hide and no injuries. And, who knows, maybe that's why I like root beer!

My own earliest memories are of standing next to Dad while he drove his old pick-up truck. I guess he felt a little crowded as I stood in his pocket, but I guess he liked me a little because he let me do just that. He would sing, “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey” as we’d go down the street. He says that on my second Christmas, at about 18 months of age, we drove around to look at the Christmas lights on houses, my foot in his pocket, and I would point my little finger and say “pitty.” (Pitty intelligent child, right?). He also says that as I pointed, my cute little finger would start to droop, and as I stood there with my eyes wide open, pointing, I’d be sound asleep.

Alta (my two-weeks-older cousin) told me how, at Grandma’s Pacoima house, we used to steal onions and crawl behind the refrigerator (ice box) to eat them. Frankly, I can’t imagine it, but Mom says it was so.

When I was still young and we lived in our Norris house, and had a phone, Dad called me one day and sang “Dark Town Strutter’s ball” to me. Well, when my Daddy sang, “Gonna come and get ya in a taxi, Honey,” I believed him. He came home from work; no taxi. Boy, was I mad!