Gordon H. Sato - Early Life

Early Life

Sato was the son of an Issei (Japanese-born immigrant) father and a first generation American born Nisei mother in Los Angeles, California. His fisherman and gardener father taught him the basic concepts of how to cultivate and appreciate living things both on land and water. He was raised on Terminal Island, East San Pedro, where a substantial Japanese American community had developed prior to World War II. Since the area was the home of the Pacific fleet, the Japanese community was forced to relocate after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After first moving into Los Angeles, in 1942 his family was forced to move to the Manzanar relocation camp for internment of Japanese Americans in the Owens Desert of California. He attended Manzanar High School in the camp where he was a member of the camp baseball team and played saxophone in the camp jazz band called the Jive Bombers. During internment in Manzanar he learned the challenges of gardening in a desert, the importance of becoming self-sufficient under deprived conditions, and sympathy toward aggrieved peoples. After graduation from Manzanar High School in 1944, he attended Central College in Pella, Iowa for a year while working at the Wakonda Country Club before enlisting in the US Army. In the Army, after service in Korea he landed in Hakata, Japan and saw the home country of one of his parents and his grandparents for the first time.