Earnest Yutaka Masumoto
Earnest Yutaka Masumoto was born in May 1943 in the Topaz Internment Camp. After the War ended and the family was able to move west, they moved to Los Angeles eventually settling in East Los Angeles. He graduated from Garfield High School, dropped out of E.L.A. College and got a drafting job at Hughes Aerospace Group in 1965 as a contractor, like other contractors, he left there and contracted at several commercial and military companies until returning to Hughes Electro Optics Company in 1985. Hughes is now a part of the Raytheon Company where he works as a Principle Mechanical Engineer.
At age 11, he joined Koyasan Boy Scout Troop 379 in Lil Tokyo and met other Japanese American boys from all over the greater Los Angeles area. He was assigned to a patrol in the Crenshaw area on the west side of town where he observed the JA boys growing up with the Blacks as he had while growing up with the Chicanos on the east side of town.
Updated April 2014
Stories from This Author
Triangle Boys
April 18, 2014 • Earnest Yutaka Masumoto
There was a bowling alley called Triangle Bowling Alley located at Beverly and Atlantic Blvd. in East Los Angeles (East Los) before it burnt down in the ’80s. It was in the early ’60s that several boys from Garfield High School congregated there after school to shoot pool, gamble, bowl, and shoot the sh**—many were Buddha Heads (Japanese Americans). We are not talking about the stereotypical well disciplined JAs that received straight As in school here—most of those didn’t go …
