<Begin Segment 26>

BF: Was your father's, your parents' spiritual beliefs, were they ever a part of this? Was there offered...

GH: No, no.

BF: ...teachings, or --

GH: They did it only as a service. Religious, they cooperated with churches, and churches were open. They could come and visit. And if there were somebody that needed special discussion or whatever, interviews, we arranged it for them. And Dad did his own, he would hear of somebody that's living somewhere -- like at Auburn, one of 'em -- he went out to visit the person. And he says, "Gee, this is the first guy who speaks Japanese that came." See, nobody, nobody...

BF: So he would perform sort of lay ministry?

GH: Yeah, he was doing that. And he was, he was, in fact he didn't, he was just doing his stuff. I didn't realize he had this kind of interest and abilities, 'cause out in the farm he would visit with people, but most were farming contacts. And so, and Mom, Mom would do the, all the management problems. But she had high blood pressure and this added to it. And we had what they call Smithwick operation, where they sever nerves when it gets too high. She'd go off the scale, two hundred and something, and that would cut down. And then in six, six weeks later they worked -- this was after a few years -- she worked for about five years as manager. And then, then unfortunately, she had to retire. And, but she didn't stay retired. She'd come down to look and then says, they should do this or that. And then she'd do it for them. And then pretty soon she's doing it. It's too handy. We should've kept her out, but I'm not around all the time. And others didn't realize this, the extent to which this added to return of the high blood pressure. And eventually she had a stroke and died. She died at age of fifty-five. That's not old these days.

BF: Yeah, yeah.

GH: And Dad lived 'til eighty-three. So that's more in the range of where Isseis have been. They're in their sixties to eighties. And some of them, like Katsuno lived to a hundred and -- I figure his age was recorded at 109, but he was really 110. And, and he was, I felt he was clear in his head 'til the last couple years.

BF: That's amazing.

GH: Yeah. And he was the fellow that kept the co-op going, farm co-op, and had the biggest loss in the deal.

BF: Yeah.

[Interruption]

GH: Well, so did the, so did this as a precursor nursing home to Seattle Keiro.

BF: Yes.

TI: Yeah, that was an interesting story. I didn't realize...

BF: I didn't either.

GH: See, they, what my parents did that era -- not so much what my sister and her husband did -- they helped to close it off. They, I think they weren't interested in continuing it. They, anyway they didn't have the same motivations, the service motivation part. I think my parents welcomed it at the beginning, and they, they actually founded really a ministry that...

BF: Yeah.

GH: ... suited them, and something that fitted their life, life goals. And they said, "Well, this is not new. This is part of what we've been doing all our lives, except it had a facility there that served it, frontally." And so they handled it, they handled it like the Seattle Nursing Home.

BF: Yeah.

GH: You know, not theirs. But it took a toll. And, Mom always had this high blood pressure thing. She, not that she had it diagnosed that way, but we did notice that she frequently fainted. And what she did was -- until she recovered -- then she'd get up and, continually. And this isn't unusual for Isseis.

BF: Yeah.

GH: Well, they, that's part of the Issei life. They didn't have a doctor at their elbow all the time.

BF: Don't complain...

GH: Yeah.

BF: ...work hard.

GH: That's right. And so we, we, but they really did contribute something that was good to see. And it was, and it opened the doors for all sorts of other things. We had people coming in, and the attitude of well, we wouldn't send our parents there, because it wasn't, that was admitting that it was not our responsibility. But they didn't consider their parents' wishes. They had a place, they belonged here. They, they wanted to come. And it was before a place was available. And so we, the community had a chance to respond. For example, when they had a fishing derby, Tokuda was, Tokuda Drug was heavily involved because it was part of their business. All the prescriptions were turned over to them and they handled it for us and gave us instructions how to administer these. And Suzuki, and Dr. Suzuki and two other doctors, there was one female doctor...

TI: Oh, Ruby...

BF: Yeah.

GH: Ruby Inouye.

BF: Inouye.

GH: Was it? Yeah.

BF: And Uyeno?

TI: And Ben Uyeno.

GH: Uyeno, yeah. He was a Nisei.

BF: Yeah.

GH: Yeah, he came in. They would come and spend certain time with their patients. Then we had Chinese. They must've had their doctors. And we had three shifts of nurses, or nurses, licensed practical nurses, but we had to have one RN. And while, while Mom was living, she was, she -- you know the owner had the right to be the RN, or in charge for one place, one shift, and then we had to have somebody else. But, we had two licensed practical nurses that were African Americans. And then she did the day shift. But she, she and Dad did the community relations. I just did the government relations 'cause I wasn't around for the other. And she would give donations to the churches as part of the regular outlet, and did the social relations with the churches. And the churches would have that as one of the outlets for service. So we had all kinds of people visiting and doing individual things, as well as church things. They would come and pick up patients who were able to attend their language service. And then the people who had experience doing Japanese films -- they would pick a time when we could set it up for our patients. And that's the time that we'd all get down there and watch the Japanese movies.

TI: So this is like the owners of the Kokusai Theater? The people there bring it down?

GH Yeah, yeah. And the ones we used to, I used to use them when I was earning money for our basketball team before the war. I would go down and, the same family sort of revived that practice and they would run films on a kind of cost-sharing basis. And, they'd, they'd get whatever the share was, they'd get the majority share, and we'd... but we would do lot of the ticketing part of the responsibility. They did some advertising. And so, I was in the university so I didn't spend a lot of time here, except on Saturdays. I helped with the books and the social, I mean government relations. And on that, I would get calls at anytime that that came up, fire department, health department.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.