<Begin Segment 37>

AI: Well, about that time, was that about the time when you and your husband also knew the artist Paul Horiuchi?

MF: Uh-huh.

AI: And he was becoming very active with his artwork.

MF: Yeah, this is his work there and his work here.

AI: Can you tell me the stories about how you got these artworks?

MF: Well, we knew that Paul Horiuchi was becoming a very famous man and Bill thought it would be nice to have few things of his and so we asked Paul to bring something for us. He came first to look here and he looked at this wooden wall here. He said, "Well, I have something that I had made when I was working as a... as a body, fender man." And he brought this and he said he made six of them and this is the last one. And then he brought this one, too. You know how much I paid? Hundred dollars for both.

AI: Is that right?

MF: That was very early. He wasn't, well, he has won, he said he won a prize on this one and he was telling me how poor he was. He said he slept -- he didn't, couldn't afford a house so he slept in the car with the family. Gosh, must've been hard up.

AI: I bet.

MF: I wish he lived a little bit longer. He would have been really famous.

AI: Well, so, in the meantime, after you had recovered from your back injury, that's when you moved here to your current home, this place.

MF: No.

AI: No? Oh, you had a place in between?

MF: Yeah, we built this house on 711 Thirty-ninth.

AI: Right.

MF: But we lived on Twenty-ninth and then we built the house on Thirty-ninth.

AI: And then --

MF: Then, then in '71 there was a, not a Boeing strike, but layoff and we didn't get very much for the house that we built. I think it was about thirty-six thousand dollars to build and then we sold it for forty-one and had a hard time selling it. But we finally sold it to a colored man. And I heard he stayed only about six months and he almost doubled his -- well, Boeing got better, I guess. It was, '71 was very bad. There was a lot of layoff in Boeings and depression time. And then we moved here in '71 and we were the third one to move in here and it took two years to fill up this whole condo. And I been here since '71 so that's about, almost thirty years, huh? Thirty-one years.

AI: Wow.

MF: I like it here, so convenient. It's close to library and close to Y, close to downtown and people are nice. They're not the kinda low-class people here.

AI: Well, you've had such an interesting and long life. Is there anything else that you recall about, just times in your life or living here in Seattle that you wanted to mention, anything else that comes to mind?

MF: Oh, let's see. Did I tell you that I was interpreter for Charles Lindbergh?

AI: You did. You told us about that yesterday.

MF: Yeah.

AI: That was very interesting.

MF: That was my highlight, I think and Yasha Heifetz, that violinist. That was just about, that was in Fukuoka, Japan.

AI: Right.

MF: When I was there. I was there one year studying Japanese flower arrangement and tea ceremony and Japanese language, writing, reading. My mother and father gave me the best education for a, for a woman. My brothers, my last brother didn't get to go to university because of the camp life but all the others all graduated from the University of Washington.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.