<Begin Segment 8>

BN: You were going to school, what... did your parents have jobs?

MT: Yeah, my father joined the police force, he was a policeman, but he didn't like that. He said most of the time they have to deliver the, "We regret to inform you that your son has passed away," a telegram would come to the police department, they went to deliver that. He said, "Oh, it was terrible." And then my mother was, like I say, she was sick. She was an invalid and she was in bed all the time. And they didn't have any medication for her, she had rheumatoid arthritis, and she couldn't... they didn't have any medication. My father ran into some man in camp, and he had a friend or relative living in Denver. So he said, "Maybe he can help you," so they wrote back and forth and the man said, "I'll be happy to help and get the medicine." So he got a doctor's prescription and they sent it up to him, and my father sent him forty-five dollars every month, and they would send the medication. And you know, losing proposition, you're working for seventeen dollars. [Laughs]

BN: Forty-five dollars was a lot of money back then.

MT: He didn't like to be a policeman anyway. So when they started recruiting, because all the younger people, the Caucasian population, they're all in the army, so nobody to pick the fruit and the produce. So they came to camp to recruit people, and so my father went over and he was picking cantaloupes and honeydew in one year, and he would pick from about April through September/October, he'd pick, and he'd come home. But then they had an offer to work at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. And a whole bunch of Kibei people went there, and they would wash dishes and do maintenance and stuff, and my father thought that was okay. And then he would work on a golf course; he ended up taking care of all the greens. How ironic that was that he would be working on the greens. And he used to tell me, he used to come home and he would say, "Don't ever play golf, Masaki." I said, "Why?" He said, "It's so expensive." And I said, "What do you mean, expensive?" He said, "I work on the greens and I pick up golf balls in the shrubs all the time, I pick 'em up all the time. Those balls cost at least forty cents each, and there's a bunch of them in there every day, every day." Not just once a week but every day there's a lot of 'em. And if we pick 'em up, wash 'em off, and we sell 'em for a dime. [Laughs] And he said, "So don't ever play golf," he used to laugh. Well, we're talking about fifty year later, I guess, I'm at a conference at the Broadmoor Hotel and playing golf, and I'm thinking, "My father used to cut the greens here before the war, I mean, during the war." Boy, funny economics living in the hotel, living like a king and everything, you know, expense account at a conference, playing golf, skiing down the hill. Ironic how things turn out.

BN: Yeah. So he was doing this, this was like short-term leave, he'd go out and do this work and come back to camp, right?

MT: No, no, he was living.

BN: Oh, he left, so he was able to leave.

MT: Yeah, Colorado Springs was about two hours away, two or three hours away maybe. Yeah, so they had living quarters for the Kibeis that worked.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.