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VY: Because I want to go back to right after camp, your parents are leaving camp and they now have three children and one on the way?

JT: Yes, all a year apart. And David, yes, right, David, one in the oven, as I said. [Laughs]

VY: So three children were born in camp. Now, while they were in camp, well, I was going to ask you if your mom was working, but it sounds like she was busy taking care of children.

JT: She was the block captain.

VY: In addition to having three babies?

JT: Oh, yeah. That was my mom, I wish you could know her. I mean, she was a dynamo like a grapevine. Everyone would go to Nellie for whatever, she had this... I don't know what to call it. It was hard as we grew older, because I wasn't Jo, I was Nellie's daughter. Oh, we could talk about that later, but it's because it has to do with identity. "Oh, you're Nellie's daughter," and everyone already knew and had these, I call them expectations because we were Nellie's daughters or kids.

VY: Oh, that's interesting. It's almost like being the child of a famous person because you're in this small community where everybody knows...

JT: Yeah, the expectations, yeah. In a good way, but I was the kind of rebel where I said, "Oh, I'm Jo." So I rebelled about that later. In camp, Mom was a block captain, and Daddy had to go out and do sugar beet, he farmed for sugar beets as they did in Topaz.

VY: Where did he go, did you know?

JT: Somewhere in Utah.

VY: Delta?

JT: No, it was not Delta, it was north. I can't think of the name, but I know that he went. We have pictures, not of Daddy doing that, but they harvested sugar beets, it was mostly what they did for other farmers. And I know that, well, there's a joke that he came home every so often because every so often, one of us would be born. I know that sounds horrible to say, but I always wanted to ask him about that, you know. But the sad -- again, I don't mean to dwell on sadness -- but I think of Dad because he loved his baseball. And Topaz had a baseball team and he was never on it because he was out harvesting sugar beets. And just two days ago I ran across a picture of the Topaz baseball team, and I see all these men who were fathers, became fathers of friends of mine. And Daddy's not there because he was out picking sugar beets. That's sort of a silly thing maybe to think of, but I love and admire him so much because he worked so hard, and I don't think he ever grumbled. Well, I'm sure he grumbled, and that made him the grump that he became, you know, your dad. And as an older guy, he had these, he didn't want to talk about it because it must have been painful for him. But that picture of the baseball team really got to me on Saturday because I looked for him. I was hoping to see him, and he wasn't in the picture. And I'd read so much about that baseball team in the Topaz Times, those papers of those days, and he wasn't in it.

VY: Yeah, that's so sad, it sounds like a, feels like a missed opportunity because it's something he would have enjoyed doing, but he was such a hard worker.

JT: Oh, yeah. In fact, I think, I know I'm running off track, but I know that because he had, there were so many of us, he had three jobs. He worked in a, he was a gardener.

VY: This was after camp?

JT: After camp he was a gardener, he worked for a produce company, he drove a truck, and we -- and I say we -- he was a janitor of a large Methodist church in Alameda.

VY: This is all at the same time?

JT: All at the same time. Yeah, because he had six kids, you know. And we were like the little six dwarves, we would go, not all of us at a time, maybe three at a time, and we'd go on Saturdays and dust the pews at the church where he worked and the boys helped with gardening on Saturdays as we grew, as we grew up.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.