<Begin Segment 26>

AI: Well, and I think, did you also mention to me in an earlier conversation that your father celebrated a birthday while you were in California?

PB: Yes. He had his sixtieth birthday, and that's when they're supposed to return to childhood and put on a red shirt. So we had a sort of a party for his sixtieth birthday. I thought, my goodness, here he's an old man, he's sixty years old. And I worried about him, I thought he should be careful, and he'd take a bath and go outside and walk around half-nude, and I was afraid he'd catch cold, and I kept saying, "Oh, you gotta be careful," and Dad said, "Don't forget, you're in California now. Not, not like Washington." But he sang songs and we'd gone out and caught crabs, fresh crabs, and Mrs. Tanouye would cook the crab, and we'd, the boys would go out to the artichoke fields and I guess they were the neighbors' fields, they'd come home with half a sack of artichokes, and we'd have artichokes. We had a real party, but sixty, that's pretty young in this day and age. But I thought then, "Oh, he's an old man now." [Laughs]

AI: Well, and then, did your father return back to Washington, but you and some of the others stayed on in California for a while?

PB: Yes, Dad took a bus and came home, and the rest of us stayed longer. We were down there for several months, maybe half a year or more. I loved it down there; I thought it was such a, so different. I loved the houses, they were so pretty, white and red and white and blue. I thought, "Oh, I would just love to live down here."

AI: But then eventually you returned back to Washington.

PB: Yes, we finally came back. When we were down there, we had a little dog one time, because one of the boys, the Tanouye boys, brought a little stray dog home. I think it was a Chihuahua. It was a real cute little dog, and I wanted to bring him home with me. But the trouble was that poor little dog was just covered with fleas, and we didn't dare to put him in the car with us, 'cause if we did, we'd have fleas all over everything. So I had to leave him behind, but I always thought about that little dog; I wished we could have brought him home.

AI: Well, so then what, what was it like after you returned back home? That would have been probably later on in 1936 or so?

PB: Some things I don't really remember. I don't really recall just what happened.

AI: But your, your folks still had the different areas that they were farming?

PB: Yes.

AI: They still had the Berto Hill land...

PB: We had the three farms.

AI: And the Kent farm, and did you say Evergreen?

PB: The Evergreen, yes.

AI: Right.

PB: So we would work from one farm, we'd plant certain things at one farm, and certain things at another farm. We would just drive and go to wherever we had to go. My mother stayed up at the Evergreen farm, and we had one Caucasian boy hired. And I remember -- [laughs] -- something that was real funny about her, she went to -- well, they needed a pot to cook in, so Mother had gone to the store, and she picked up a chamber pot. [Laughs] And she gave it to this young man, and she says he could cook in it. She didn't realize it was a chamber pot. But we laughed about it, said, "Well, if you got it from the store, it was perfectly clean." But he must have thought it was awfully odd when she handed it to him. And we kept two horses up there because that was kind of a peat moss ground there. Real flat, and we had Italians on one side, and we had Japanese neighbor on the other side. And I used to go there and harrow the ground, that's when the lady next door said, "Oh, I don't believe she could work on the farm after being, living in the city." But she couldn't believe it when I was out there harrowing and working just like before.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.