<Begin Segment 12>

AI: Well, there was... it sounds like there was so much activity in your life and in the community and in your school during the 1930s, but there were also some difficult times, too. And I think you told me that it was in 1934 that your father became ill or that he was diagnosed.

EH: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

AI: Tell me about that.

EH: Well, he, he began having fevers and not feeling up to par and found out that he had tuberculosis. And we had a... the Japanese Presbyterian minister took us to the public health clinic, and we all had to get at least skin tests. Maybe we had to get X-rays also. My mother certainly did. And then we came home and we fumigated the house, and it was very strong. We couldn't stay there. I don't know, I, I think we came in... came back at night. And it was, it was worrisome be-, and for my mother it was a little bit of desperation. That's probably the only time she considered sending us to Japan, because she was... I think by that time she was able to pick up a little bit of the insur-, she knew enough about the insurance business, because when my father wasn't there or people telephoned, she could relay messages or know what to tell them to do. And so when my dad became ill, she continued to be able to do that, and then pretty soon she was confident that she could do it. And the, the branch office that we had in downtown was also willing to help her. And she knew enough English that she could, she could read and she could... understood the business terms and things like that.

So Mr. Inai taught her how to drive. Every night after the store closed they were... and she liked driving. She, she had the guts to try to drive a car when we were in Chico, and she ran at a... into a pole or something. And she said she was so happy she discovered that you're not going to die even if you have an accident. And so when she finally learned to drive when I was eleven or twelve, in no time she was going all over the place. When evacuation came along and we had curfew hours, she wouldn't come home by eight o'clock when you're supposed to be in. And she would reprimand me because I was, I was working for my room and board closer to college about two blocks away from college, and I'd have to take the bus to go and get back there. And if I left after sev-, six or seven o'clock she was, she was really angry and saying how that's dangerous, anybody could shoot you just because you're a Japanese. And, and yet when she started to, helping her clients, and she covered a wide area. She... in those days she didn't go... after the war she certainly didn't go to San Francisco, but all these rural families were so isolated, she had tried to help them understand what the rules and what the signs on the telephone poles were saying and that you had to get immunizations and that's going to be provided at such and such a day at the Buddhist church. But she, she never ran into trouble. Even when she was... even before the war, before Pearl Harbor, if a policeman saw her late at night and she was kind of weaving, the policeman knew that was a sleepy driver and he would pull behind, beside her and say, "Park. Sleep." And I don't know whether she really did, but she, she generally traveled maybe a fifty-mile radius, and...

[Interruption]

AI: So, before we took that short break, you were telling me how your father had gotten sick with tuberculosis and that your mother was going to continue the insurance business.

EH: Uh-huh.

AI: And in the meantime, what happened with your father? Was he, that year, 1934 was he required then to go to sanitarium?

EH: (Yes).

AI: When --

EH: I think he must have been in a local hospital for a little while, and then was taken to Wiemar Sanitarium about fifty miles north of Sacramento. And then we... children weren't allowed on the, in the cottages and, and hospital grounds. This Mr. Inai would... I think before my mother really learned to drive well, he would take us almost every... almost every Sunday. And the kids, we would spend time playing or eating picnic lunch or crackers or something waiting for them. And it turned out that also I had friends who were up there in Wiemar. I had two or three classmates, so it wasn't a new, new horrifying, shocking experience. I think I probably had, I had a friend whose brother was up there. I had two or three classmates up there. So and so's par-, father was up there. In fact, I had a Mexican family neighbor next door to us who had friends up there, and they had gone up to see their friend and decided to look up my father, and, and they did. And I think when you're in confinement like that you're glad to see anybody. And that was, that was a pleasant surprise.

AI: So --

EH: And they told me about it when they got home.

AI: So it wasn't a shock to you, but we know that historically, that many people had very negative feelings about tuberculosis at that time.

EH: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

AI: I was wondering, did you or your family face prejudices because you were then known as a family that had a tuberculosis...

EH: No, because it wasn't that isolated. We had a half a dozen friends... my, either my classmates or classmates that had one parent or another up there. It's true that there was some stigmatism. I had a friend who, whose oldest sister became tubercular, and that family, rather than sending her up to Wiemar, built a wing on the third floor. And they took her food up there, she never came down, nobody ever saw her. Most of us sometimes didn't realize that there was an older sister up there. And I, I think she just died up there. I don't know how sick she was. It didn't sound at first like she was very sick, but confinement is going to wear on you.

I had another friend who was related to the... let's see, by the time that happened we had moved, this Mr. Inai who had lived upstairs in the upper flat when we first came to Sacramento bought the house across the street, elevated it so that it became a two-story house. And the Inais lived on the ground floor, and we lived on the upper... on the second floor. And one of Mr. Inai's nieces became tubercular and was also up at the same sanitarium. Eventually she died up there of intestinal TB.

Ironically, one of our closest friends, close friends, she was, she was an only child and her parents were often farm laborers, so, so she was by herself a lot. And she started to complain about a stomachache and she said, "Gee, I must have appendicitis. My, my side hurts," or something like that. All the way through high school at least, she was saying that. Then when we got into camp, she was... I think we, we went to the same church. We were just across the street. She was at our house a lot. She was also at another house that her... because her father worked with the other's father. And so she was also over there a lot, but when (we) finally got to camp, she apparently was able to just on her own get... go to the hospital and talk about it. And, and then another friend about... I relocated to Chicago, and, and this friend's brother was a doctor at camp, and the doctor said to his younger sister, "Gee, you know that friend of yours that's complaining about a side ache?" She says, "By the time they opened her up it was too late." And that it had, again, I think hers was intestinal TB. And they might have been able to save her had they paid attention and took her in early. But so it was, it was very common.

AI: Well, now, this was... this year was... you mentioned that, in the beginning, that your mother might have felt a little bit, well, you said "desperate" because of the family situation.

EH: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

AI: Your father going into the sanitarium.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.