Kay Nakauchi reflects on 68 years with Huntington Beach school district
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What’s the secret to working nearly seven decades in the same school district?
Kay Nakauchi has it.
“I never looked elsewhere for another job, because I was happy here,” she said, simply.
Nakauchi retired earlier this school year from the Huntington Beach Union High School District, where she spent 68 years as a stenographer, administrative secretary, executive secretary and certificated personnel secretary.
She is now 88 years old, so maybe it was finally time.
“Well, I didn’t even think about it until the last minute,” Nakauchi said. “I probably thought I was gonna work until I died. I don’t know, but I was happy, you know. I enjoyed it, and so that’s why I kept going. As long as I felt I could contribute.”
She may be a petite 4-foot-11, but she was a tower of power in the district for decades. Her retirement party was in December, but everyone wanted a chance to hug her again when she went back to the district office on Tuesday.
Nakauchi’s story is one of perseverance. In 1942, she and her family were incarcerated at the Manzanar Japanese-American internment camp in the Owens Valley along with about 10,000 others. They were among 120,000 who were placed in concentration camps across the western United States, along with two in Arkansas.
Nakauchi was just a small child at the time.
“I remember the older kids saying, ‘Beware of the boogeyman, don’t go near the fence,’” Nakauchi said of her time at Manzanar. “At the fence, there was a tower with a soldier up there with a gun. So they told me, stay away from that area. That was kind of scary.”
The family stayed at the camp for two years, before being hired by Seabrook Farms in New Jersey. The business was a major supplier of vegetables to the military, but was facing a labor shortage due to the war.
Nakauchi, originally from Pasadena, lived in New Jersey until 1953, when her father Henry and mother Hatsue moved the family back to Southern California and to Huntington Beach. A strawberry farmer had offered Henry Nakauchi a position, and they eventually opened a nursery together in Westminster.
Kay was a sophomore in high school when she came back to California. She graduated from Huntington Beach High in 1955 — the only high school in the district at the time — and attended Orange Coast College for a couple of years before joining the school district.
And that’s where she stayed, for 68 years. She served under 13 superintendents and two interim superintendents. During her time in the district, eight additional schools were established.
“I can remember typing all those courses of study, the different subjects, and we had to use mimeograph stencils,” she said. “They were long green sheets, and you typed on it, and then you took it to the mimeograph machine to duplicate it.
“We had no Xerox machines back then. When I typed letters, I needed to use the letterhead, a carbon sheet, a sheet that was the copy. Sometimes I had to make two or three copies, and so you had to type it all at once. And darn, if you make a mistake, you have to put a little piece of paper between each one and erase it.”
District Supt. Carolee Ogata said that Nakauchi, who she worked with for 12 years in the human resources office, has truly been exemplary at her job.
“She welcomed every employee to this district with such grace, and they stayed because of the first impression she gave,” Ogata said. “This office loves Kay. Obviously, you saw that because she’s kind. There’s no drama around the people. She was such a good role model. Comes in early, stays late, will come in on a Saturday if she doesn’t finish work and didn’t expect anything in return.
“She hates this recognition more than anything,” Ogata added with a laugh.
Nakauchi said she enjoyed meeting new people and the day-to-day interaction with her coworkers. She said she always tried to stay positive.
Nakauchi, the third of five children, is single. She said both of her older siblings are now deceased, but she still enjoys spending time and cooking for family gatherings with her two younger brothers, both of whom live in Orange County.
Her family never brought up the time in the internment camp after leaving Manzanar, she said.
In her retirement, Nakauchi is enjoying quilting, sewing and gardening. Oh yes, and puzzles.
“Not the 500 or 100 pieces,” she said of the jigsaw puzzles she tackles. “I want to go for the 1,000 pieces. I finally found one, 2,000. I haven’t done that yet. I haven’t started, but 2,000 pieces. Wow, that would take me forever.”
That’s all right with her. Nakauchi, a key piece of the district’s puzzle for so long, knows that good things can take time to develop.
