<Begin Segment 18>

AI: Well, at about that time, what kind of reactions did you get from your neighbors or your customers? Did some of your customers stop coming to your business after the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

MF: Yeah. It was surprising. They all picked up all their things and they didn't bring anything in. It was really sad.

AI: Did anyone say anything to you, or...?

MF: No, they didn't say anything. They just picked it up and didn't -- we had no business at all at the very end before we evacuated.

AI: That must have been difficult.

MF: It was really sad. And most of them were Jewish people, too. And Montlake was Jewish people before they moved out to Seward Park.

AI: What about the, your neighbors that lived close by? Did they start treating you differently also?

MF: No. That wasn't it. We had a drugstore in the corner that really sympathized us and came to say, "We're very sorry how people react to something like this." And there was a doc-, a dentist across the street, Dr. and Mrs. Price. They invited us even to dinners and we had a curfew, remember? And we had to be home by eight o'clock. And they -- see, they practiced until six and they'd start having dinner. So we went there about six-thirty and we had to be home by eight. So we had a nice dinner and just had a, after coffee and things like that and then it was about seven-thirty so Bill said, "Well, we better start going home." So she lived in Sand Point. So that was little far from where we lived in Montlake. So we left about seven-thirty. We were home by eight.

AI: Did you ever have any problems of being out a little bit late after curfew or --

MF: I don't think we went out very much. Weekdays I don't think we ever went out.

AI: But it sounds like the curfew did affect your lives that you --

MF: No, it didn't really affect our lives. We had David and he was small and I didn't want him to be out late so miss his sleep, so we didn't go out very much unless on Friday we always went to dinner to Japanese Town to have Japanese food. But otherwise I used to take him in a crib. [Laughs]

AI: Well, about that time some other people have told me that they were worried about being considered sympathizing to Japan or being considered too Japanese and so that some of their families decided to get rid of their Japanese things or their pictures from Japan or --

MF: Yeah, they told us to destroy these past pictures so my husband didn't have any pictures of kids when they were very, very young, when they're even less than a year old 'cause they were all gone when I came to marry him.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.