<Begin Segment 46>

MA: So how long, then, were you living in New York and running that business?

GM: One year. One year, and I had this camera repair business, and I decided to come back.

MA: Come back to Fife?

GM: I came back to Seattle, stayed with my sister in Seattle, now. And I opened up a camera shop, the Nisei Photo Shop, and during this time, I was buying quite a bit of equipment from Tall's Camera. And Mr. Tall approached me and says, "Have you sold before?" and I said, "No." He says, "Would you like to sell?" and I says, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, if I have an opening, I'll hire you." So it took six months before he hired me, and I didn't realize it and I didn't care anyway, but I happened to be the first Japanese that sold in a white business on the front counter. There was Japanese selling, but they're, they belonged to Japanese companies and stuff like that. But I was the only one that was actually talking to people coming right into the door and approaching them and selling to them. And there were others downtown, like Seibo Fujii, he worked for Weisfield, but he worked in the stockroom. And when the Japanese came in and asked for Seibo, they'd call him up from the stockroom. Yeah, I was right on the counter all the time, meeting people as they came in.

MA: What was that experience like, I mean, working in the counter as one of the only Japanese salespeople at the time?

GM: Well, I took it like any other person, and I had encounters with people who came in and said some remark to me, too, but I -- if it was something I didn't like, like if they say, "I won't buy from a Jap, Jap," I'd say, "Well, what did you do during the war?" And that shut 'em off so fast that it was no problem at all. And, of course, there was one time when Leonard Tall, the boss's son was talking to me, and this guy come in and says, "I won't buy from a Jap." And Leonard picked him up and threw him out of the, out in the sidewalk, and he said, "Don't you ever come back into this store again." And I told Leonard, I said, "Don't worry about me. I can take care of my own problem." But that's the kind of person Leonard Tall was in the twenty years I worked for him. He was an old navy man, and we used to talk about the war during work time and stuff like that.

MA: So then this family, the Talls, Tall family was obviously very open-minded.

GM: They were, and after Nobi Kano was going to school, photo school here in Seattle at the time, and I got called into the, for the Korean War. And my assistant, Keith Slotvig, he got called in also, so they had to replace him and Nobi was just coming out of school and they hired Nobi to be a salesman. But he was a salesman for the professional department. And I had part of that job before, too, so he took my job, and...

MA: So what happened when the Korean War started? I mean, to you?

GM: To me? I had, got called back into the war, because I was in the reserves. So when I got called back in, or my number was coming up, they were going to call the reserves, being, working at Tall's I had this good friend, Major (Joseph) Marshall, who was a schoolteacher at Garfield and worked for the Veterans Administration. And very close friend, and I asked him, "What's going to happen?" And he said, "Well, twenty-one days after you get called, you'll be going to Korea." And I said, "Oh, my God," I says, "I'm an infantry soldier and if I get called, I'll be in Korea within a month." I said, "How do I get out of it?" And he said, "Well, I could get you out," he said, "just, you gotta join my outfit." And I said, "What kind of outfit you got?" And he says, "Well, I got a, I have this reception center at Fort Lawton that we're going to go to Fort Lewis." And I said, "Oh, I'm, I worked a year for the reception center in Fort Lewis." So I had the experience in the type of work they wanted, and he said, "Well, how about joining up? There's only one catch to it," he said, "you gotta go in right now. You can't wait a month, because a month from now you'll get called. And so he says, I says, "Gee, one month," and I told Leonard Tall, I says, "You know, Leonard, I think I'm going to get called, so I better take the best way out. I'm going to join up," and told him the story, and he said, "Okay." So I joined...

<End Segment 46> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.