The great thing about oral histories is the stories live long after the person has died.
Such is the case of Dr. Kazue Togasaki.
She was in her mid-90s when she died in 1992.
Togasaki participated in the Study Center’s Oral History Project in 1978.
She was just 8 when the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco hit.
Hoodline edited her recollection of that day.
“I was 9 years old and was going to school at Clement Grammar on Jones and Geary. [The quake and fire destroyed the school.] I remember waking up that day — our bedroom was next to the kitchen — and the chimney had fallen in, and the kitchen was filled with soot. I remember we got dressed and walked from our house to 14th and Church where there was a hill, and that afternoon and for two days in the daytime we sat, watching the city burn. We were staying with my uncle on Dolores where it comes into Market Street. He had a carnation nursery near Church and Market. When the fires started, my younger brother, who was about 6 years old, would go stand at the window, see the whole city burning, and then scream. We tried to keep him back from the window, you know, but it just fascinated him — he kept going to the window and screaming.”
Togasaki delivered more than 10,000 babies in her long career. You can read about her memories of her early life, time spent working as a doctor at various incarceration camps and how the discrimination she faced motivated her to become a doctor in Hoodline .
