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AI: Well, so, as you were saying, your father had a five-year lease on that, on that property with the barn, and then you, after that, you moved to another place around 1923?

PB: Well, we were looking for a place that we could buy, but, of course, those days, the Isseis couldn't buy property, so we would have to use my sister's name. And I didn't realize that I had kind of thought we lived there about five years, but I was able to get the original copy of the lease signed by my dad, which I think he's the grandson of Mr. Rudberg. And he gave me a copy of the lease, so I was real happy to get that, and right on there it says, "Five-year lease." And it says that my mother -- well, she was the one that had the money, and we had to pay him with gold pieces. Twenty-dollar gold piece, and I know we had a struggle, and I remember my mother coming up with a twenty-dollar gold piece, and I used to wonder where she got it, because those were hard times, when we'd think we were completely out of money, and then my mother would come up with a twenty-dollar gold piece. [Laughs] So she was pretty good in handling the finances. But we finally found a place, maybe a mile from this place, up on Berto Hill. And that was sixteen-and-a-half acres, and it had a house on it, and we lived there for, right up until war came along.

AI: Well, could you describe it? Kind of give me a picture of what it looked like there on Berto Hill?

PB: Well, it was a big hill, and in the wintertime, people used to come sledding. And they'd slide down that hill, they can slide from top of that hill clear down to Des Moines, the Des Moines proper. And young people and old people alike would come, and sometimes the cars would get stuck on the hill, and my dad would have to get the team of horses out, and pull 'em out of the rut, because they couldn't get out. And they'd sled there for way late at night. It was a great place for them to go sledding. And 'course, we raised all kinds of things there, vegetables mostly, and we had a lot of fruit trees. Prior to that, we didn't have any fruit trees, and I don't know why, because with, being on the farm, everybody had fruit trees, but we didn't have, happen to have any, except for the one peach tree that we had at Des Moines. There was one real good peach tree by the kitchen window. But here at Berto Hill we had all kinds of fruits, lots of trees. There must have been forty trees there; apples, pears, cherries, plums, prunes, everything.

And it was, parts of that land was rocky. When I think of how many years we picked up rocks, we picked them up and (then loaded) onto the sled, hauled it to the edge of the field, and then we'd dump it along the fence line. It just seemed like the rocks multiplied. I don't know why they keep coming up; no matter how many times we'd pick 'em up, there'd be more rocks the next time. So we used to think if we'd only farm in a place where it was sandy and not rocky, like that. But then there were sections of the land that was rock-free, and we had the most wonderful water there, well that must have been artesian or something. But people used to stop and get water, because it was ice-cold.

AI: Well, for people who aren't familiar with using a well, can you describe how the well was set up, and how you actually got the water out?

PB: Well, Dad used to dig that well, I don't know whether there was a shallow well there in the beginning, but the side would cave in, and my dad would have to shore it up, and he'd put boards along the side, he'd go down in that well. And I was a natural worrier; I used to be just scared stiff that the walls would cave in when he was down in the well. Oh, I worried so much about him going down in that well, but he used to go down and dig, then he'd put the board on the side. And it was fairly deep.

AI: And did he have a hand-pump to pump the water out?

PB: Yes, then we had a hand-pump, or... that was later on, though. First we had to draw the water by bucket.

AI: So you, did you actually have a crank, a hand-crank to draw the bucket up? Or how...

PB: I don't remember exactly how we did that, but I know that we had to get water by the bucket. I suppose we had some kind of a way to haul that bucket up, and we kept a big tub of water right next to the well, which was the horse's drinking water. [Laughs] And we kept goldfish in there, and we'd leave the goldfish in there, and they'd freeze in the wintertime, so every once in a while we'd have to go and defrost the ice so the fish could swim again, 'cause it'd be stuck in the ice. It's a wonder that the fish lived in that ice.

AI: It is.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.