It’s the best thing to ever happen to me in my life. At the time you get fired - ‘cause you could get fired for different reasons - but if you get fired because of your boss is prejudice, or if you get fired because of you did something wrong, there is differences. And I felt that I did nothing wrong to be fired. So I felt that I should fight my firing.
The first time was in San Francisco, and so I – but I did get re-instated. But I worried about how my – how I’m going to feed my kids, what my wife is going to say, that kind of thing at the very beginning. However, when I did get fired, I was kind of unknown in the ghetto San Francisco, and all of a sudden people wondered, “Fred got fired! What did he get fired for? What did he do?” So my name came up, and the national YMCA heard about me, so they offered me a job. And that started me into a whole new career. So since I got fired, I decided time to leave anyhow.
Date: March 4, 2005
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Florence Ochi, Art Hansen, Yoko Nishimura
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
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