Victoria Sachiko Taketa. I was born August 8, 1947. I was born the 20,000th baby in San Jose. I was born at San Jose Hospital. And San Jose had this huge competition about who will be the 20,000th baby. And if you look at the San Jose Herald, they're the ones that ran the articles and eventually took a picture of me and my mom. My mom, I'm going to be my mom, and she's holding me, and I became the 20,000 baby and the I believe it was the chamber that held this huge composition competition. And it was like working it up. You could you could tell by every article that the excitement was starting to increase. There's a young boy who's looking at a blackboard, and it's it says 10,000th baby. So he must have been the 10,000th. And it said, who will be the 20,000th? And so when the day finally comes, as my mother tells me, she was working on the farm and she tells my dad, it's time. I need to go to the hospital. So he drives my mother to the hospital, and he waits till she's wheeled into the labor area. And my mother tells me that everybody was excited. All the other women who were waiting were all excited because they wanted to be and have the 20,000th baby and my mother comes in and my mother's like, “she's going into labor.” And so I became the 20,000th baby.
The interesting part is I asked my mother, what did that mean to her and to my dad? You know what? And she said she didn't know that they were having this competition about who will be the 20,000th babies she just heard about when she got into the area where the women were all waiting. And she heard them saying things like, oh, there's there's all these presents and the birth will be free, you know, and it's going to be an honor to to be the the mother, and it's an honor for the child. So I asked my mother, I said, so what did you what did you get for, you know, having the 20,000th baby in San Jose? And she said she believes that the hospital said that the birth was free. But she said, you know, your dad and of course, I know my dad…He's very he's not going to he's not going to love that. So he actually paid; even though they said the birth is free, my dad paid for my birth.
And so I said to my mom, Well, when I was 18, you gave me a baby ring and you gave me the the picture. And who gave who gave that the baby ring? And it was Hearts department store. And if you ask anybody that's pretty close to my age or my generation and they're they've lived in San Jose they will know Hearts department store. It's a it was a beautiful store and right downtown San Jose and hearts was…became the family became I don't want to say famous but well-known because their son was kidnaped, and he was a young man and they kidnaped him for ransom and he he was killed in it. So it's kind of a sad story. And so I always thought that the reason why the Hearts gave a baby ring, it was a 14 karat gold little baby ring, and it was in a really cute little box. I always believed it was because of their connection to their child. And so they just you know, they they gave the they they offered the ring when the competition was going on. And they just wanted the ring to go to the baby.
So I always felt like that was the connection. So even though my parents worked really hard to make a living, they would always shop at Hearts, and Hearts was expensive. And I used to think, okay, why don't we go somewhere else? And maybe art, our dollars could stretch a little. But. But from that point on, I understood. Mm hmm. My parents and why they did what they did. And so even when I came to school here, I would go to Hearts and I would shop at Hearts, and I could still see the inside of that store. And there was kind of this always this connection. I don't know if the rest of my family felt that way, but I always felt this connection between myself and the owners and the store. So I shopped until the store closed in downtown San Jose, and then they opened a store or maybe had another store in Sunnyvale. So I shop there until it closed. So that's the that's the story about 20,000th baby.
I often wondered and I've always talked to friends of a few friends of mine about, you know, how did they you know, here they are waiting for the 20,000th baby. They made this big public, you know, kind of like public competition out of it. And I often wondered what else was available for the mothers and for the, you know, for the child. And we used to…wee used to talk about maybe we ought to go and look up records and and see what that's about.