Transcript of interview with Toshiyuki "George" Goto by Christina Oda, February 26, 1979

UNLV University Libraries George Goto i An Interview with George Goto An Oral History Conducted by Christine Oda Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV University Libraries George Goto ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2018 UNLV University Libraries George Goto iii The Oral History Research Center (OHRC) was formally established by the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada System in September 2003 as an entity of the UNLV University Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The OHRC conducts oral interviews with individuals who are selected for their ability to provide first-hand observations on a variety of historical topics in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. The OHRC is also home to legacy oral history interviews conducted prior to its establishment including many conducted by UNLV History Professor Ralph Roske and his students. This legacy interview transcript received minimal editing, such as the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. The interviewee/narrator was not involved in the editing process. UNLV University Libraries George Goto iv Abstract On February 26, 1979, Christina Oda interviewed Toshiyuki “George” Goto (born 1922 in Huntington Beach, California) about his life in Nevada. Goto first talks about his move to Nevada in 1951 before talking about his family, church activities, politics, and recreational activities. He then discusses the building, economic, and environmental changes in Las Vegas. Goto later talks in depth about his profession in landscaping, including the work he completed for some of the hotels and resorts built on the Las Vegas Strip. The latter part of the interview includes discussion about Goto’s Japanese ancestry and his perceptions as a minority when first moving to and living in Las Vegas. The interview’s conclusion covers the topics of social activities and Goto’s organization of a local chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. UNLV University Libraries George Goto 1 What is your name? My name is Toshiyuki Goto. And where were you born? I was born in Huntington Beach, California back in 1922. Did you go to school there? I went to high school from Huntington Beach and moved to Montebello and graduated high school in 1940. When did you move to Nevada? I moved to Nevada here in the Spring of 1951. That was a real tough year. Why was it a tough year? Well, the reason it was tough is because I came out here to Nevada, and there’s very few Japanese, very few. There was about eight families here at that time, and I came in real, like, if I was all alone—no friends, no people to talk to, and nobody to confide in, and I was on my own. My wife and I, even—by my wife and I, I mean, I came here by myself, first, and then my wife came in a year later. So, like I say, it was tough. Why did you come to Nevada? Well, when I first came in here, my older brother, the doctor, and I went and we traded a 1948 Cadillac for forty acres of land out here, and so I thought maybe he would like to come and take a look at it, and when I saw the land way out there where the wastewater treatment plant is right now, I thought, “Boy, we were really robbed.” But, as you look at it now, we weren’t. We did not have the foresight at that time, and who has foresight?—everybody has hindsight. Do you still own the land right now? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 2 No, we sold that land around, it was condemned by the City of Las Vegas, and then we had to sell it to the city. Oh. Have you moved since living here in Nevada? Oh, I moved three places, three times—well, make it four. We lived on Vegas Valley and Desert Inn Road, about forty acres of land there back in 1952, and then I built a duplex there for my brother and I. Then, in about 1957, ’58, when I was doing landscape in the Tropicana, we moved into Isabel Street near Sunrise Acres School, then in 1962, we moved to 905 East St. Louis, and now we moved into our present address at 409 East St. Louis. What was it like coming into Nevada on your own and trying to get a job? When you first come in to Nevada like this, most of the people—I would say, ninety-nine percent of them, was very, very friendly, and the thing is, when you—me, myself, being of Japanese ancestry, I stand out like a sore thumb. I joined the Optimus Club, and when I first started my landscaping business out here, I knocked on doors, from door to door, looking for jobs to do. And like I say, when I joined the Optimus Club and I was a full-fledged member of the Optimus Club and I had ten years of perfect attendance. What is the Optimus Club? Optimus Club is a club where men like myself in business and other businessmen get together and try to help the boys. Oh. Did you have any children? Yes, I have a boy, now, he is twenty-eight years old, and my daughter is thirty. Are they still living in Nevada? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 3 My son lives in Nevada here, and he’s a baccarat dealer at Caesars Palace. My daughter lives in Newport Beach and got a Ph.D. in biology in Fullerton, Cal State, and now is employed by the, what they call, Squibb Pharmaceutical Supply. Did they go to school here? Yes, they both graduated here in Las Vegas. My daughter went to school at Vo-Tech and took up beauty supply, as a beauty operator, and graduated, and when she got out of school, she got a license to be a beauty operator. My son went to UNLV for two years to be a CPA but then decided to be a baccarat dealer. Are you involved in any church activities? Very little church activities. My wife is a Buddhist; I am, what you call, we used to go to a Lutheran Church out here, but we’re not too active in church activities. What about politics? Politics, I’ve also been wanting to go into politics, but every year, I try to dream up an idea of what I’m going to do, and then I think of how much it costs to be a politician—I decided against it so far. What party? I am a Republican. Oh. What type of recreational activity do your family enjoy? Well, my wife is what they call a bingo player. She doesn’t like to go out and do any sports. I like sports activities. I like hockey games, basketball games, football games. I love to go fishing. I go deep sea fishing at least, oh, eight, nine times a year, fly to San Diego and fish off of San Diego and catch the tuna and albacore and yellowtail. Were you married in Las Vegas, or? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 4 No, I was married back in 1947 to my wife. And we met on a blind date, and like I say, it turned out real good, and we’ve had our ups and downs like everybody else, but after you get so old and then married to them for thirty years, we figured, well there’s no use fighting about it now. What types of changes have you noticed in Southern Nevada since you’ve been living here? Southern Nevada here has changed dramatically in the last five, ten years, it’s been going in spurts. Building has been going on in spurts here in town—1951 to ’55, it was booming. At that time, what you call a boom, we put up 100, 200 units, that was a boom. Now, if you put up 5,000 units, that’s a boom. But we’ve had recession years back around ’58. Right after the Tropicana went up, there was no new hotels going up, there was nothing in sight, and until about ’61, ’62 until it starts coming up again, started coming up again, then at about ’65, all the bottom fell out of the market here. There was houses here that you could just walk in and say, in, like First Western Savings or Nevada Savings & Loan would say, “Please live in this home and keep it occupied so, try to keep the vandalism out.” And they only wanted you to live in it. And they gave you six months to live in there, and if you wanted to, move into another house for six months for free. It was a very—like I say, it was a very depressed area in ’66, ’67, ’68. What about economic changes? Economic changes is everything has been going for the best out here, and I don’t see how anybody can miss, if he has a little bit of ambition and a little bit of initiative to go ahead and do what he wants to do. If he’s going to do something—my philosophy is, if you’re gonna do something, do it right, and make sure you work hard at it. Don’t slough off. If you think that, every time you look around and think the other side of the fence is greener, then you got to the other side, and you always find that the side that you came from is a little bit better. What about environmental changes? How has the weather been changing? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 5 The weather, to me, seems to get hot sometimes, hotter, and they say it’s a dry heat and all that, but to me, when you get up to 116 to 120, and I’m out there every day of the year, and when it gets hot, it’s hot. I don’t care if it’s we hot or dry hot—it is hot. What type of occupations did you have, like, from when you first got here, what kind of jobs did you go through? Oh, when I first started here, I was doing individual loans, knocking at doors trying to get jobs here and there. But then I had a contract to do—my first contract was to do 110 homes up in the Wesley Tract. You were a landscaper? Landscaper, yes. And at that time, when I applied for my landscape contactor’s license here in Nevada, there was no such thing back there in 1952. They did not have, even, a landscape category until 1958, and then when I took my examination and application for a landscape and sprinkler contactor’s license, well, I was actually put on what they call a grandfather clause. What is a grandfather clause? Grandfather clause is something that, say, you’ve been doing for years, and all of a sudden they put in a law that you have to have a license. So, without taking a test, or without taking an examination or anything, they just give you a license. Oh. And what jobs did you do? Well, when I first got my contactor’s license and everything, the first major job that I did was, to me, I still think is the best landscaping job in the whole state of Nevada, is the Tropicana Hotel. That hotel with the landscape and the sprinkler—the whole thing, the design, which I designed and I contracted to put it in, was a total cost of $258,000. How long did it take you to put it in? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 6 It took me about a year to put it in, and this is not working steadily on it, but then towards the end when all the construction was practically finished, then that’s when I really moved in with my crew, had thirty to thirty-five people working for me there, and I had trees that I set in and took two cranes to put in a tree that, right next to the theater restaurant inside. If you look at the olive trees at the Tropicana, you will see that just about every one is identical, and you would, at that time, a tree like that cost $350 planted, each. Now, those trees you could not replace for $1,500 to $2,000 apiece. So you can see what a vast improvement and what a vast amount of money is invested in the Tropicana Hotel. Did you do the landscaping while the Tropicana was being put up? Yes. While the hotel was being built, the conception that the owners had at that time was, when the hotel was finished and when it was open, they wanted the trees to be live and growing, green, shrubbery, lawn—the whole thing. They didn’t want to be left behind. The landscaping nowadays is always a rush-rush deal and a last minute, and when it’s a grand opening and they’re putting in the last tree and cleaning up. We had cleaned up, ready to go, the grass had been mowed for six months, the trees are in full bloom—everything was ready to go. We planted, at the Tropicana alone near the pool area, over 500 rose bushes. What year did the Tropicana open? 1958. So we started that in the middle of 1956, and we finished in the latter part of ’57. Then from the Tropicana I did what we called Tally Ho; now, it’s called the Aladdin Hotel. The Aladdin? Yes. But it was formerly called the Tally Ho Hotel, and Mr. Ed Lowe, the owner, he was from New York, and he was the one who was going to build a hotel in Las Vegas without any gambling and said it was going to work, but it did not work. So, finally, he had to sell out, and UNLV University Libraries George Goto 7 then the Aladdin came in and rejuvenated the whole thing and put in gambling and everything else. Oh. Any other casinos? Oh, and then we did the Castaways. The Castaways Hotel—I think that wasn’t such a big job monetary-wise, but to me, that was a work of art in there. I built a waterfall in the front there with a lagoon coming around up in front of the front desk there, and then I built a bridge there. Then we had a pine, a, what we call a (unintelligible) pine that came up on a forty-five degree angle, and then went straight out horizontally about eight foot about the lagoon, and it was about thirty feet long. And that tree, you would never suspect or never realize what a tree like that would be worth at that time. This is back in 1962, and that tree was worth $10,000. Have you seen a lot of changes in the way the landscaping has been done? Oh, landscaping has altogether—it has changed tenfold out here, and when I first came here to Las Vegas and I got the contract to do the Flamingo Hotel, I was maintenance man doing the maintenance at the Flamingo Hotel for eighteen years—in that eighteen years, innovated winter seeding, which has never been done out here. What they were doing at the Flamingo when I first got there was, they were taking the old soil out, putting new soil in every winter. And when I came, I left the old soil there and the grass there, and I reseeded, renovated, and reseeded, and had a beautiful lawn all winter long, which they never had before. I think I was one of the first ones to start there. And another thing which, I was one of the first ones to experiment with plastic pipe for irrigation system, for our sprinkler system. This Bud Kennedy from Turf Equipment, he was one of the first, and he and I both started the sprinkler business almost about the same time. So you were also into sprinkler systems besides landscaping? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 8 Oh, yes. Sprinkler system to us right now, sprinklers, watering is the most important thing in the whole thing—in your yard, everything. A plant will not grow without water, so you must have water. And water, they said in Nevada, you cannot overwater, but this if false. You can overwater, and you will overwater, and it’s been proven that your plants have rotted in the soil here because of that fact that, just because they say it’s hot out here, 110, 115, that the more water you put on, the better it is—the more water you put on, you have more chances of the lawn and the shrub getting diseases. So, you just have to watch yourself. Las Vegas has a climate all by itself; it is a far cry from the Los Angeles, California area, Oregon, and even from back east. Like, right now, like now, if, say that I wanted to hire a gardener or a landscape man, I can very seldom get a local man to, say, come in and say that he’s been here more than one year or two years. Most of the people that you go and hire from the employment security and from job references and all that, they always come from out of town. Now, why do they come out of town? It’s because back east, they only have gardening or landscaping six months out of the year; here, we do it all year-round. So, consequently, we have more opportunities, more things to do, and the thing is, we’ve got work here all year-round, and if a man right now is, say, that he can’t get a job, my gosh, that guy is not trying too hard. So how many years were you in landscaping? Oh, I’ve been in the landscaping business since 1951, since I’ve been here in Las Vegas. Since you’ve been here? Since I’ve been here. So how many years is that, twenty-eight? That’s twenty-eight years I’ve been doing this. And how old are you now? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 9 I’m fifty-six years old. So, that’s almost half your life. Half of my life. The other half, I was in the flower business. I am what they call a florist designer, and by looking at me and looking at my hands, you would never think that I could make a corsage or a wedding bouquet or a thing like that, but I do all this. I am a designer. Do you remember anything about the Old Ranch? Oh, the Old Ranch is there a little bit past Eighth Street and near, I think they call, let’s see, right across the railroad track. And right now, it’s only a building there with about, oh, maybe a dozen cottonwood trees that they originally planted. The building itself is a little bit dilapidated now; they have not taken care of it. But to me, that is one of the most beautiful spots in the whole valley if it was being taken care of, and if it could be revived, I think that’d make a beautiful spot for anything. Can you describe the location and the condition of the adobe walls surrounding the original Mormon settlement? They had what they call the Mormon Fort, and they had adobe walls that, they made adobe like Indians did many, many years ago. They got this clay from the meadows there, got straw, made adobe out of it, and they made a sort of like a fort there, but actually it was just a dwelling there. And right now, nobody has kept it up too well, and it’s slowly deteriorating, and it’s just about done now. They have got a society to try to save it as a, what you call a monument or something like that. But they haven’t kept up with it, and I wish somebody would get up some money to do something to keep it up. What name do you remember best about the Old Ranch? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 10 Oh, the Old Ranch always reminds me of the Stewart Family. The Stewart Family is one of the oldest families in Las Vegas, and their descendants or their sons and the sons from that family, now they own Nevada Rock and Sand, Stewart Brother Construction, and this is why I connect these people with the old Stewart Ranch. Do you remember anything about the aboveground atomic tests? I remember it was here back when I first came here in ’52; now they’re talking about the aboveground testing and all that, and they said the radiation and all that—but I worked outside all the time that the tests were going on. Sometimes I felt a tremor; most, ninety percent of the time, you never felt anything. All you know is it went off this morning at eight o’clock. Once in a while you look, and you can see a cloud of dust, but to me, it didn’t even faze—it didn’t bother me. You look that, “Oh, another bomb went off.” It was just an old thing to most of the old timers here in Las Vegas that it was not a big thing anymore, ‘cause once or twice you see an explosion like that go off, then from then on, it was nothing. You never thought anything about it. How did it affect the environment? As far as I was concerned, it did not destroy any of my plants. I didn’t die, it didn’t hurt me, it didn’t hurt my cats, my horses, or the dogs that I’ve had. My plants survived the blast. If they had any radiation out here, it would have killed my plants, too, but it didn’t bother them. And then, like I say, it didn’t hurt any of my pets or anything. We lived through it, and I don’t think I even got a scratch out of it—nothing. As far as I’m concerned, it was just another big blast. Can you remember and locate any of the old trees on the Mormon Ranch? Oh, yes, right now, there’s still, like I say, about a dozen cottonwood trees out there, but without any water and fertilizer, it’s been neglected out there. They’re just about done now, and like I UNLV University Libraries George Goto 11 say, you go out there and you might as well just chop it down for firewood, if it’s any good for firewood, even. Okay, now what is your ethnic background? My ethnic background, I am Japanese, and my mother and father came from Japan, and like my mother is now, ninety-four years old, living in Montebello, and she came here to America at the age of sixteen, so she’s been here a long time, and then she went back to Japan two or three times to visit, but I myself have never been to Japan. I lived here, lived in Montebello until 1951, then I came here to Las Vegas, and then I’ve been here in Las Vegas ever since, and like I say, I’ve never been to Japan, and the furthest west I’ve ever been is maybe Los Angeles, Santa Monica. How has your ethnic background affected your life in Southern Nevada? In Southern Nevada, ever since I came here in ’51, I don’t think I’ve had any bad, or what you call, bad relationship with any ethnic group in town. I myself, when I first came here, I felt self-conscious about being a Japanese and coming to a strange town, but as long as I minded my own business, did my work, and did it like the best of my ability, I did not have any problem. Like I said, I didn’t have, absolutely, any problems at all. Nobody has ever came to me while I was in Nevada and said, “What are you, Jap, doing here?” or something of that sort. Nobody has come and threatened me, nobody has done my bodily harm, and they have respected me for what I can do and what I have done. So you haven’t felt any changes in the prejudice aspects from the time you were here till now? Oh, I have never had that feeling of being persecuted or being dominated by any other ethnic group or by the so-called Americans, the White people, anything like that. Me being a Japanese and so-called “slant eyes,” and horn-rimmed glasses out here, but the thing is, propaganda is a UNLV University Libraries George Goto 12 funny thing. Like, when I was in Chicago during the war years just before I went in the service, a little girl went to her mother and said, “Say, Mom, is that a Jap?” And the mother would say, “Yes, he is.” But the little girl says, “No, he can’t be. He hasn’t got horn-rimmed glasses and buck teeth.” And this is the image that you have propaganda with. So the image is still there with all the propaganda. If you throw out these propaganda sheets all over the world and all throughout the city and things like that, this young generation is what—and the people—I am not afraid of the educated people. It is the uneducated people that we’re afraid of, because the uneducated people are the one that do no not know what they are doing, they do not think, they do not do anything to do for themselves. They always have to have somebody say, “Do it.” And they’ll do it without any reason. Now, why I say this is, saying that they’ve got to have a leader, or I say that I am not afraid of the educated, is simple, because during World War II in 1941 when I was evacuated from California, sent to Manzanar in a relocation camp, the poor Chinese, the Philippinos, and the Asian people that was left on the coast were beaten up. They were fired on, cars were burned, houses were burned, because these ignorant people did not know the difference between a Japanese and a Chinese or a Korean or whatever Oriental nationality. And if they would have read the paper and seen television—or, not television at that time, but newspaper, radio—they would know that the Japanese were evacuated out of the whole California, Oregon, and Washington area. Then, if they would have known that, why would they be beaten up and throwing a big scare into the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Philippinos saying, “You dirty Jap.” Well, these are ignorant people. This is why I am more afraid of ignorant people than I am of educated people. The educated people, they know what’s going on. And you’ve never encountered any of these ignorant people here in Nevada? UNLV University Libraries George Goto 13 Not here in Nevada. But during the war years, when I went, going through Nevada, and then I went to Salt Lake, the state of Utah, there was a couple places in Utah where I was refused a haircut, I was refused services to eat. And then another place—it was a very instance—is when I was in the service, when I was in Biloxi, Mississippi, when I got on a bus to go to New Orleans, the bus driver didn’t know what to make out of it. I was a little bit tanned, and I was still not colored—I’m not a White man—they looked at me, and I don’t think they ever saw a Japanese before. So I had to wait in line until the last person got on, and then they said, “Okay, go on, get on.” So, naturally, I did not know what the proper rules and regulations were, so I took the best seat available for me, and I took that seat in back of the curtain. And that meant that I was in the colored section. So the driver came up and told me, “Get up in the front.” So, this is what experiences that I have seen in the South, and when I was at Camp Blanding, Florida, when I was training for the 442, the combat unit at that time, I never saw so much prejudice in my life, and thank God that I was not connected with that. I really feel fortunate about the whole thing. Do you have any social activities here in Las Vegas? Social activity, I tried to join, tried to be active, tried to do things like I say—I was in the Optimus Club for ten years, and I had the perfect attendance record there with the Optimus Club. And then, right now, I am active with the Japanese American Club, or the JACL, and it’s a national organization. But I started this club here five years ago just to see if I could get some Japanese people together here, and like when I first came here, there was only eight families—it was easy to say who’s here and who’s not here, but as the town grew from eight families now, we have approximately a population of about 2,000 Japanese here. And that is my estimation. And my gosh, when you walk down the street and you look at an Oriental, and they look like a Japanese, you think they’re Japanese, but you’re scared to say something to them. So, now that UNLV University Libraries George Goto 14 we have started this Japanese American Club, we have about eighty members strong now, eighty families. And once we get to know them, now we walk down the street or we go down to a hotel where they are employed or to a business where they have got their business going, we know that they are members of our club, we can go down there and speak freely to them and say, “Hi, how are you? I haven’t seen you since the last meeting,” and so forth. This is what this thing is all about: something to get the people acquainted with. Now, we have this Japanese American Club, it’s very active, we try to keep our Japanese cultural heritage alive, we have our dances, what we call the Ondo, Odori, or whatever you call it, but the street dancing and things like that. We have judo classes, we have what we call Japanese needlepoint, we have classes in how to make fishes, storks, and things like that out of ribbon, we make ribbon flowers—things of that sort. Well, I, myself, I make bonsais, and I have a bonsai here that’s twenty-seven to twenty-eight years old that’s not more higher than a foot, maybe eighteen inches. Things of these sort, these are things that I like to preserve, I like to preserve for our heritage. Like my son, he’s in the baccarat business now, dealing, my gosh, he’s not interested. He’s interested more in golf, going around, and things like that. But I, myself, as an old timer, I still live in the past a little bit and still think of the future, but I still remember the old day. I love to remember the old days. A bonsai is, you know, what we call is a tree that is a dwarf. The whole secret of bonsai is only discovered in the last ten, fifteen years when they went to Japan and when they saw these small miniature trees grown in a little pot, say, four-by-four, and it’s a full-grown tree only six to eight inches tall. The Americans and all the people in the world wondered how the Japanese ever did this. And the secret is out now how they did that, it was only a simple matter of (unintelligible) and is one of the fascinating things about plant life, which I mostly interested in. I can make a bonsai here and struggle along with a bonsai for twenty-five, thirty years, and still have a tree that’s only six UNLV University Libraries George Goto 15 inches, twelve inches high. But if you plant that and take it out of that pot and plant it into the soil, it’ll grow up to be a natural tree, a natural bush. But the thing is, the secret of the whole thing is try to make it small, and make it, like I say, a miniature tree or a forest. This is what you call a bonsai. Now, this is another thing that people don’t realize, and during the war years it was a big thing, and it still is to the aid farmers, or we call chicken famers back in Wisconsin, Minnesota, back east, and even in Southern California and all throughout the nation. You could never tell a hen from a rooster until six or seven weeks afterwards, until a rooster gets a comb, But the Japanese, back in 1936, they perfected a thing where you look at a chick and tell whether it’s a male or a female and get it ninety-nine percent perfect. And my older brother was what we called a chick fixer. And this is a very interesting fact. Now that they have started schools, now we have a lot of them doing it, but at that time, it was a big thing. Because, like, you feed a chick for six weeks before you can tell, and for a cent—what they charged was a cent or a cent and a quarter per chick to sex them out and look at all the feet. Because you’re looking for hens and only a certain amount of fryers. The rest, you might as well get rid of it because all they do is eat, and you waste all that food. So this is why chick sexing was a big thing, and the Japanese was the one that originated that. And my brother, my older brother, he was one of the first to go to Japan to learn this, and he came back with that knowledge. So, these are the things that I keep reminding myself of, and our heritage—we like to keep our bonsais up, our dolls, Japanese dolls, we like to keep our needlepoints going and our dances. All we want to do is have parties and have fun and get to enjoy each other. How many times a month does your club meet? Our club meets once a month. We try to meet the second Monday of every night at the Osaka Restaurant, which is owned by one of the local residents here that’s been living here, oh, since UNLV University Libraries George Goto 16 1931 or ’32. He was born here, then went to Los Angeles, then came back. And he’s been living here ever since, and he started the Osaka Restaurant there quite a few years ago, and he’s doing very well there. And like I say, there’s other Japanese restaurants that have come into town, the hotels have built great, big Japanese restaurants and things like that, but still when you live here and you have to go to a local restaurant, these are the places you have to go to and which you really enjoy going because you know the people there, you know the owners. What other activities does your club join into? Well, our club here, Japanese American Club, now we have joined the International Festival Committee, and it started back in 1976, the bicentennial year, and this is where we had all the ethnic groups in Las Vegas combine, and in 1976, we had it at a convention center. All our clubs, all, what we did was put up our flags and put up our dishes of food, like we specialize in Japanese food, they know us for chicken teriyaki, tempura, and sashimi and things like that. So, this is what we put out to sell, and then we have our Japanese dances that we put on, and every ethnic group did the same thing. They put on their own ethnic background music, their own dances, and their own food, and we made a success out of it, and it’s been going on ever since. So we’ll have another one this year, but it won’t be on a 4th of July, like we try to put on as close to the 4th of July as we can, but this time we’re going to have it on June the 24th, and I think it’s going to be real nice. It’s getting bigger and better every year. Last year, we estimated about 30,000 people coming into the convention center to look at our festivities, and everybody has really enjoyed it, because we do have food from every nationality that we can get people to join. And we have the Greeks in there, we have the Italians, the Germans, the Jewish people. We even have the Arabs in there. We have the Valhalla group, wh