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AI: Well, so then, in 1944, what did you decide to do, since you --

EH: Well, then I went to Chicago to look for a job, and went to the relocation office and they sent me to Curtis Candy Company, and somewhere along the way -- I was always meeting friends who were on their way out of camp. And, and that was fun, because in the big city of Chicago, it's nice to have friends.

AI: Where did you live when you first got to Chicago?

EH: Well, Mabel, Mabel Sugiyama and I, who's a, who was a classmate, was coming -- she was, she was looking for a job. So actually, Mabel and I shared a, a big one-room apartment with a pull-down bed, and life in Chicago was very different. It's so hot and muggy and kind of dirty. I mean, sooty. You couldn't wear white things, you couldn't wear clothes two days in a row 'cause it was, it would be so dark-stained. And it was so hot. But couple of months in Curtis Candy Company and we said, "That's it. We can't be doin' this." You know, and of course, it was minimum wages. I can't remember what it was, but the apartment also wasn't that expensive. And it was in an area -- we found the apartment in an area of south side of Chicago where ironically, there was a whole big section on Drexel, in Chicago, where a lot of Niseis ended up. You know, what happens is somebody finds a, a place and they're quite comfortable, and they invite other friends or family and pretty soon you have one -- and they're fairly close of University of Chicago. And, and when I decided I'm not staying at Curtis Candy for long, it was, for me it was interesting and it was kind of fun because I realized I was seeing a bit of Americana. On these candy factories there were Lithuanians and Irish and Italians and most of them were always talking about their schooling, which always turned out to be a parochial school. And they would be comparing different sisters or different orders, and, and I got a flavor of real factory working, manufacturing-centered, big town Chicago. And when I listened to Lithuanians and Italians and Irish and, you got a real flavor of what life was really like for these people. There was an Irish woman who probably didn't have much education, but what advice or criticism she gave was really solid, honest, practical advice. But two months of that was enough. And constant noise, though I did send a lot of people boxes of candy, because you could, we got it for a nominal fee and in, in wartime, it was, you couldn't get candy that easily, or it was expensive or something. Here we got it for just pennies, and I would send boxes to camp and my sister in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And we did, we did that a lot.

AI: I'm interested that, in the, at the Curtis Candy Company, that you did work so closely with European immigrants and European Americans, but from what I've heard about Chicago, is the neighborhoods are very racially, were very racially separate at that time. Was that, did that...

EH: Well, you know, the southern half of Chicago, practically, is solidly black. And, and yet, there's a, kind of a transition line where it's a little bit mixed, but for instance, for a lot of, the section where a lot of Niseis lived, around the University of Chicago, is right next to the black section. So you're often mixing on the elevated trains and buses. And I think that a lot of us probably worked in offices where there were mixed, agencies, public agencies. For instance, the Preferred Insurance company that I worked in, I had to constantly put ads out because the people you got, the gals you got in to do that kind of clerical work were so, sometimes terrible. I mean, they didn't care. They were almost juvenile delinquencies or they're kids that quit school or something. And you, you couldn't cope with all the mistakes they made. So once I put an ad in, I got a couple of black applicants. And 'course, they wouldn't, my, my boss, I think he said, "Let me handle it." I knew he wasn't going to handle it, but he was going to let his secretary handle it or something. They would not hire blacks. And this was... let's see, '44. I think I stayed in that insurance company from about '4-, end of '44 to '45, '6.

AI: Well, tell me, how did you, how did you get -- was this the job you got after the candy company?

EH: (Yes).

AI: You went to -- how did you get the job at Preferred?

EH: I went to an employment agency. I mean, that was the -- I wasn't (going to) go back to the relocation office because they would just send me to either Curtis or give me a domestic job. Because in those days, it was still early in the game, '44 was, the war was still on, and we were just beginning to come out of camp in droves. And the student population generally, we went to school, and this was summer, end of summer. And so there were more of us. But my mother, for instance, I think, went there. She had gotten a job at --

<End Segment 46> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.