{"id":25,"featured":0,"modified":"2025-12-02 20:58:13","latitude":40.76764299999999963119989843107759952545166015625,"longitude":-111.8947509999999994079189491458237171173095703125,"title":"Robin Doi crashes his Dad's Cadillac","subtitle":"","fullsize":"https://utahjapantownstories.com/files/fullsize/17466b813413ab56620d13e296694aa9.jpg","address":"First South Alley","all_locations":[],"zoom":15,"creator":["Craig Nagasawa"],"description":"Transcript:
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\r\nCraig Nagasawa: "Once, Robin Doi, who was slightly older, he's probably like three, four, five years older than me and Wade. Wade Doi and I were the same age. When you're 15, you want to drive really badly. Everybody wanted to drive. I think it was a kind of feeling of the ticket to freedom or something. Being cooped up in Salt Lake or being cooped up down there on First South, so we were always begging to try driving back there in the parking lot—in the dirt parking lot where nobody could hassle you for being a kid driving. We'd always beg, “can we move the car?” Because we'd have to move the cars around to practice baseball and stuff.
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\r\nWally Doi had this huge white Cadillac. All the business owners eventually accumulated Cadillacs. That was their goal. That means that as an entrepreneur, you made it, I guess. And of course, they all had big vans and pickups in the back that were used for deliveries and bringing stuff in. But there was this big white Cadillac, probably around ‘62 or so, had these big white fins on the back and all that. Well, behind the Aloha Cafe building there was a series of garages that were made out of cinder blocks and the Dois had two of them. One had a boat in it, a boat on a trailer and then one is where they kept the Cadillac. Robin Doi, after a practice one day, kept saying, “Come on, come on, Dad, let me pull the car back into the garage!” And so one day his dad finally relented and said, “Okay, here's the keys. Just pull it in nice and smooth, put it in there and close the door, we'll go have a shake at the counter.” So we're all standing—he was so excited because he finally got to try driving it. So he gets in the thing and he starts pulling into the cinder block garage and all of a sudden he hits the gas full on instead of the brake and there was this big screeching sound and the Cadillac went right into the back cinder block wall of the garage and just demolished the whole front of the car plus the back of a garage. [laughs] I just remember staying there in complete silence because Wally Doi was one fierce guy and I just thought, oh my God, Robin Doi is gonna like be tortured. He's gonna kill him right now. He was so upset. He just didn't say a word. He just like turned around and walked away and went inside. Which made it even worse because we're all standing out there shaking, wondering what to do. Do we still get our shake? Can we still go in and have our shake? Which we did and we were afraid to go inside. I'm sure whatever happened after, he caught an earful for whatever happened and eventually it all got fixed back up and so on."","sponsor":null,"accessinfo":"","lede":"","website":"","related_resources":[],"factoids":[],"files":{"https://utahjapantownstories.com/files/fullsize/17466b813413ab56620d13e296694aa9.jpg":{"id":45,"mime-type":"image/jpeg","title":"Robin Doi, Wade Doi, Craig Nagasawa, Mary, Wallace, and Kimie Doi.","description":"Mitsugi M. Kasai Memorial Japanese American Archive","thumbnail":"https://utahjapantownstories.com/files/square_thumbnails/17466b813413ab56620d13e296694aa9.jpg"},"https://utahjapantownstories.com/files/original/1b1dbce411c10137c5c94234b8a20ab7.mp3":{"id":36,"mime-type":"audio/mpeg","title":"Craig Nagasawa remembers Robin Doi crashing his Dad's Cadillac","description":""}}}