<Begin Segment 9>

AI: Well, now I wanted to ask you a little about your plans for after high school. When you were in high school, what did you think you would be doing after you graduated?

SH: I wanted to go to college. I wanted to go to college but my dad passed away right after I, a year after I got out of high school, two years after I got out of high school. So I became the head of the family, I had a farm to run, so my plans of going to college ended there. One of my teachers said, "You ought to go to college." He kept telling me in my senior year, "You ought to go to college." I said, "I know, I'd like to go. But," I said, "I can't." He said, "Why can't you?" "I got to take care of my mother and my two younger sisters and keep the farm going. I can't go and I can't afford to go." He quit telling me to go to school. But I remember this man, particularly. He was my chemistry teacher, and he said, "You should go to school, high school," -- I mean, college. "You should go to college," and, "It's close, it's the University of Washington, you should go." I would have liked to have gone, yes, but I kept farming until the war started.

SN: You said that you had two younger sisters and that your father had passed away. And it sounds like that, you were primarily the person who was running the farm?

SH: Yes.

SN: I just want to get an idea as to what, like the roles of what people did on a farm. Like, I'm assuming that you had to run the farm because you were the only son and the oldest son, at least in the United States.

SH: I didn't get the last part.

SN: You were the only son.

SH: I was the only son, yes.

SN: You were the only son to run... and then what were your sisters doing? What kinds of things did they do on the farm?

SH: They were both two years apart from me, and they finished high school, both of them finished high school. And, by the time my younger sister finished high school, she graduated class of '40, so one year later the war started. So they went to camp with me. We stayed together in camp, my mother, my two sisters and myself, until I got married. And, then I got an apartment myself.

SN: So, what type of things did they actually do on the farm, your mom and your sisters?

SH: Oh, they helped pick the strawberries. They did all the work, packed tomatoes. And during the summer did all the hand labor, weeding and stuff.

SN: So, it's basically a family-run.

SH: Family-run, yes. The only hired help was we hired strawberry pickers from Seattle. During, and it was handy because strawberry season was June, most of June, and just about time school let out. We had youngsters from Seattle come and we gave 'em room and board, it was... they stayed, they couldn't commute from Seattle to pick strawberries. And, I have hired as many as a hundred strawberry pickers, but that was a little later. That wasn't when I first started farming.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.