<Begin Segment 50>

MA: George, I wanted to ask you about, so you, you lived in Seattle from, like, 1950s on, right?

GM: Uh-huh.

MA: And do you ever return to Fife?

GM: A few times. I go out and visit my sister maybe once every six months. I like to visit more, but they're still out there.

MA: Do you still keep in touch with some of the friends that you had in high school?

GM: Well, you know, my friends would be well over eighty years old now, and there's times when I've been out there where somebody'll come up to me and says, "Hey, aren't you Morihiro?" and I says, "Yeah," and I wouldn't remember them. But, "I'm So-and-so," he says, "we went to school together," or something like that. But during the reunions, of course, a few years back, I did see a lot of 'em, lot of 'em, but they all remember because my sister still lives in Fife, and it's a close community.

MA: It's still a close-knit community?

GM: Yeah. So they would remember your name and everything. But it's different today.

MA: How, how has it changed?

GM: Well, as far as Fife is concerned, the strip down there going into Tacoma, you know, it's all lined with boats and cars and stuff, and stores and everything. That used to be just a... the left side of the highway used to be a railroad track, the interurban that went to Seattle, and that's all filled in with houses and very few farms out there now. But the farms will be taken over in a few years, too. Where I lived, down the street a little ways, there used to be six, seven houses on my side of the street, and a big pasture across the street and a crick. Well, now, it's all filled up with houses, and the crick becomes a, better land because of the water going through their property and stuff like that. It's sort of like a park back there. But it's changed quite a bit, the population growth is something else.

MA: And you've noticed that the farms have kind of been taken over?

GM: Well, they got smaller and smaller, yeah, uh-huh. Because the people come in and build houses and stuff like that. And it's not practical, a lot of places like Auburn and Puyallup valley, it's not practical to farm, because the tax gets so high, like my brother-in-law's mother's place out in Auburn, they taxed them $450 an acre, because Boeing was all around there, and, and if they planted something, they couldn't get $450 out of it, so it doesn't make sense to be farming and not make a profit on it.

MA: What happened when the Issei farmers, they came back from the war and they, they had their children? Did you notice, kind of, the children wanting to go into the city more and work?

GM: Well, first of all, the farmers, they were pretty old anyway. And when they went into camp, for some of 'em, though they didn't like it, it was like a vacation because they didn't have to worry about going out in the farm the next day and working hard. And in the camp, they got their food anyway, and sort of like a retirement for some of 'em. For the younger ones, they didn't want to go back to the farm, that was the whole thing. Some of the older Niseis went back to the farm because they were operating the farms by then, but the younger Niseis in the twenty to sixteen years old, maybe around there, didn't want to go back to the farm. They lived on a farm, but they had the chance of finding other jobs, and as they grew up, with the help of their Issei parents, some of 'em had a pretty good nest egg, you know, property, they were able to go to college and get a better job. And those GIs that came back, a lot of 'em used the GI bill to go to college, most of 'em did, you know, and went to Boeing, places like that, and they got away from the farm. But this is the way it is; it's, anybody had a farm, you find this during the war, when we went to Idaho and Minidoka, the young kids went to war or went to Seattle area and got a defense job, which left the fathers and mothers running the farm, and they didn't have a labor, they had a labor problem because nobody was there to help 'em harvest the crop. So the Japanese in the camp went and harvested Idaho and Montana's and some of those crops, and they saved them, actually. But it happened here, too. When we come back from all this, we had a chance to improve ourselves and go to school of higher learning and get better jobs. As far as the Japanese were concerned, they had the thing inside of them, their knowledge that they learned in their lower grades and things, you know, and the inspiration to get ahead. And they jumped at it. And so the Nisei families grew up to be quite prosperous.

MA: Do you think a lot of that came from the lessons learned from their parents?

GM: No, I think it's basically times, times where you had a chance to do a lot of this thing and they did most of it on their own. Well, the basic Japanese culture helped them, but I myself, when I went to school, the photography business was a starvation thing for me because I had to work 'til three o'clock in the morning producing prints, then get up early in the morning and go out and shoot pictures and come back and process it, and worked 'til late at night to get it out. At the end of the whole thing, it didn't add up. You weren't making anything for all the work you're doing. It wasn't that profitable. You couldn't hire anybody because if you did, you would go broke. And there was a partner with me that did this for a year after that, and there really wasn't profit. It was fun taking pictures, and we did a lot of pictures, made catalogs and things like that. It wasn't a portrait or something like that that made money, it was the commercial jobs that we did. And whatever money we made, we put it back into equipment and things like that, and it took a long time to get, get a good start. So by the time I went to work for Tall's, it was a good break for me, because when I worked for Tall's, a lot of my friends were now starting with Boeing. My job at Tall's was strictly on commission, and at that time, most of us were making about $6,000 a year. Well, Boeing engineers were making about, top Boeing engineers were making a little over four thousand dollars. And as we, I kept selling, I worked at Tall's for twenty years, as I kept working for Tall's, my wages, which were real high, didn't go up as high as Boeing people, because Boeing wages for engineers kept going up, up, up past us again, after five, six years it passed our wages up, and it kept going. Where working on commission, it was, unless you sold a heck of a lot, it was hard to make more money. And you had to be a good salesman, too, to work at Tall's. It wasn't a matter of just working there, you're competing with the rest of the guys alongside of you, and we're always fighting every day about who's taking who's job, sales and stuff like that. But it was a lot of fun.

<End Segment 50> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.