Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Fumiko Uyeda Groves Interview
Narrator: Fumiko Uyeda Groves
Interviewer: Larry Hashima
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 16, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-gfumiko-01-0030

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LH: Well, now your family came back. They obviously moved into the home that you had had before the war, and you'd mentioned that you went down to the basement and pretty much everything was gone. What did your mother and father do to get back on their feet, so to speak, get everything back in order?

FG: Well, my father very enterprisingly, he naturally he didn't have a job, right, so he looked in the newspaper and he found, he looked for somebody who wanted, needed a gardener, garden work done. And so what he did was he found it and he called. I think it was Dr. (Roscre) Mosiman on Magnolia and he put... I think he was his first customer. But, anyway, he put a pair of scissors and he put his lunch, but, anyway, he put it all into a paper bag. He put scissors and clippers and things and he got on the bus and looked for the house and went to work and used their lawnmower. And then he got more and more customers. He kept looking in the newspaper and he got more and more customers, and then pretty soon he needed a car. And so he had a friend who was in, I think, in Illinois somewhere and had moved out to Illinois. He was a friend of his from Seattle but he never came back, Mr. Kobayashi. And so he asked Mr. Kobayashi if he could buy his car and it was a 1928 Chevrolet.

LH: And this was still in Seattle?

FG: Uh-huh, and this was in 1945, I think.

LH: So the car was still in Seattle and he had left it there garaged.

FG: And so first my father asked if he could borrow it because he couldn't buy it, right? And then so he bought that from him. The problem is that it ran, but it never went up hills so you had to go around the hills. And then, so then eventually, I don't know where he got it, but he bought a 1936 car. I can't remember what it was. And then he used that for a while that and pretty soon he bought a, he bought a lawnmower and then he worked his way up to trucks. [Laughs] But at first he went to work on the bus with a bag of tools in his hand.

LH: And this was just from the experience he picked up working for Kubota Gardens that he, and that was almost ten years before --

FG: Yeah, right.

LH: -- that he'd actually last done this. It's pretty amazing that he had.

FG: Gutsy. Daddy was gutsy. He figured he could do anything. [Laughs] All he had to do was try.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.