<Begin Segment 35>

FM: I wanted to talk about the bad conditions of health there. I guess I already have. The toilets were poor, extremely poor. The bathing was perhaps the worst thing in that you're using the same water to bathe in that the next guy... the Japanese furo style. And I always had a little difficulty putting up with that, but, when the unions came in, as I recall, showers were installed and we had that arrangement. But the worst problem with respect to health was that this is an isolated community, cannery, and if one got sick in any serious sense, why, you would be in real trouble because you'd have to be flown out and the air flights were not all that readily accessible. However, two things: one, I don't remember that people ever worried really very much about this, about the health conditions, even with respect to bathing and so on, we got so we would put up with it and thought of it as not a condition that was all that threatening. And then the companies were fairly careful to take care of people when they did get sick. I recall at one time I got a boil on my wrist and continued, and it was a boil that wouldn't heal, partly because I was handling fish all day, and there was a kind of danger of its, of the infection spreading, and at that point the... Mr. Nagamatsu and Jack, the foreman, became concerned enough so that they ordered a airplane flight called in. I was flown to nearby Craig, I think it was, town, where there was a doctor who lanced it for me and took care of it and I was back at work very shortly. And this is the way in which problems of this kind were handled. The airplane would be called in and the patient would be flown out as needed to wherever had a good medical facility. Now, this place called Craig was only ten miles away from Waterfall. So it was a short flight. And I remember because you get up in the air and you can see the cannery down there, very beautiful mountains and so on. Beautiful flight through the cann-, but, and seeing a different town was interesting. But the point is that they did try to take care of workers, which was, I think, from their standpoint important, because if serious illness occurred in these canneries and people were not cared for, why, they would lose trust of the workers, and that, of course, would have been very damaging. So then with respect...

AI: Oh, excuse me. Still staying on the health topic. Do you recall any major injuries? You had described the work process and the machinery and it sounded like, and the lye baths, and I thought --

FM: Yeah.

AI: -- well, there is a potential for some severe injury there.

FM: There was potential for severe injury and yet, when you raise the question, I don't remember ever there being a serious injury at the work situation. And I think that possibly tells us a little bit about the nature of cannery work. Cannery work was not physically all that demanding, although there, some of the jobs were demanding, but, it was not a dangerous kind of work. Now, my cousin, who went to the same cannery and used to work at the "iron chink," went to a sawmill one year, and he cut off a finger. And thereafter he couldn't work at the "iron chink" because the cold water would affect him so the, when he came back to the cannery, the foreman assigned him to another job. But bearing on the point that sawmill was much more dangerous than cannery, you see. Although he was working at perhaps one of the most dangerous jobs in the cannery, namely at the "iron chink" which has a knife pointing straight down to where your hand is, you see, and this thing comes around and as the fish flips over it cuts off the head and goes on then and you put it in the machine. He was doing that job, considered to be a dangerous job, not dangerous compared to the sawmill where he lost a finger because he was, the saw he was pulling just missed, I mean, hit his finger in a fashion he didn't anticipate. So, in terms of danger, curiously, cannery work is not a dangerous work.

However, if you went out on the fishing boats, then it was dangerous, but the white people were doing all this. They were getting paid for it so perhaps they could not, would not complain about it. And the workers who went out on these fishing boats and so on, had in mind more "what I will get in reward for what I'm doing." They're not thinking about the danger as much. That's why you still have fishermen going into the Bering Straights and so on.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.