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FM: Then, with respect to the work itself, well, yeah, I've already told you about the work itself. It's terribly tedious type of work. You know, you do the same thing over and over again. And this could go on twenty hours a day sometimes. I, in fact, that's one of the features I should mention. That in my job, when the season got busy, we had one, well, we had a bad season, as I said, the first year I went. We loaded, we packed ten thousand cases of salmon. That's a very bad season. Ten thousand cases of salmon hardly paid the cannery enough to, well, certainly lost money. Forty thousand cases, the cannery would make a small profit. But we had a year when we had a record pack, 220,000 cases, as I recall. Waterfall, you know, felt that it had broken the record of cases packed and everyone, including the workers, was, were happy about this, and everybody makes a lot of money, especially the owners. Workers don't gain that much, however, when you pack 220,000 cases of salmon, at least at Waterfall, I worked literally twenty-four hours a day for two weeks. Now that obviously is not possible. [Laughs] What happened, I didn't work twenty-four hours. You had to take breaks, one-hour breaks for dinner and meal, okay, take three hours off, that's twenty-two hours, twenty-one hours, and but even twenty-one hours continuous work. Why was that so? Well, Dick Yoshimura and his brother and I were cleaning machines. So we had the job of cleaning machines and therefore, after all the day's work was done, why, we then start in working for three hours cleaning machines. Well, if you had a long day of fifteen hours of work you've got another three hours of sticking around cleaning machines and doing other chores, and that's how I had this job of working, maybe twenty hours a day sometimes. And how do you manage that kind of thing? You're not sleeping, presumably, but we would sneak out each, Denny and his brother and I would take turns sneaking off during the day and sleeping in the, some area of the warehouse or the cannery where nobody would find us, and we'd take a two-hour break every now and then. And this way we could manage. And when I think back of those days I think, how could I have done what I did? But, under pressure, why, you can do all kinds of things, the human body is amazing in that regard. So, on those, in those seasons where we had record packs, why, we worked long hours, and really, health-wise, that was the really bad thing about this job, that we were pushing ourselves beyond normal endurance, but, on the other hand, they did pay us overtime for these extra jobs and therefore I was making enough money to go to... this was in a period when I was going to graduate school, I was earning enough so that I could go to the university and do graduate work without having to work during the school year. And that was a great bonus. So those are the conditions that I remember about the, the bunkhouse layout, and so on.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.