“Friday is my busy day. I go to the hair dresser. I go shopping and go to the restaurant to have lunch,” says Sally Taketa who turned 101 in July. “I enjoy eating almost anything.”
Sally Taketa was born and raised in Sacramento. She lived at 2017 5th Street. Her father worked in a music shop selling pianos, phonographs, and radios. Her mother picked up seasonal work at the cannery. She had three siblings.
“We were surrounded by lots of Portuguese, Italians, and Mexicans,” says Sally. “We did what they did.” She and her friends roamed the neighborhood on Halloween and removed people’s gates from their hinges. “We dropped them off a block away, and they’d have to go find them afterwards.”
Sally went to Lincoln Elementary School on P Street, Sacramento High School and then Sacramento City College where she took up studies in “social welfare.” She also spent a lot of time at Southside Park playing tennis. That’s where she met her husband Henry Taketa.
“At first, I didn’t think much about him, because I was so much into my tennis. It took some time. He was good to me. He had a car and would take me to William Land Park.”
Sally got a job with the State as a social worker. She traveled around the state checking on families. “There weren’t many Orientals asking for help, mostly other ethnic groups,” she says. “I used to walk into homes and find there wasn’t much food on their table, or they had trouble paying the utility bills.”
After the war Sally and Henry settled in Land Park. They raised two sons, David and Richard.Henry had his law degree, but his practice had a slow start. “Most Chinese and Japanese didn’t trust a young kid handling their legal matters,” she recalls. “He took anything that came up.” Over time, Henry earned the trust of farmers, grocery stores, and other businesses. He became a prominent attorney in the Japanese Ameican community and a large supporter of ACC during the building of its nursing home.
Sally looks back on her 100 years, “I guess I have to be very thankful that there was no tumbling around in my life. My in-laws were very good to me. I was quite fortunate that everything went so well.”
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