<Begin Segment 6>

MA: So going back to your, your parents, it's unique that they didn't really attend church and weren't really involved with church for Issei at that time. How did that kind of affect their relationship with the other Japanese Americans around Fife and that area?

GM: Well, I think in those days, most of the people were Buddhists, and the parents were. And like my sisters, they took up a different Christian religion. And, and the mixture of all these religions with Buddhism helps all the community a lot better than everybody being Buddhist to start with, and Buddhist forever. So as far as religion is concerned, what it did was to help people communicate easier by having their own churches to go to and be part of it. And sometimes -- and when the war started, that kind of hurt a lot of people, because if you had, if you were an officer in a church, you're most likely to be looked up on by the FBI. And since my father wasn't in any church, and they never came to him. But I think my father was just as much Japanese as any other person who went to church.

MA: So even though they didn't necessarily go to church, they still felt that they were part of the community?

GM: Oh yes, they always been part of the community. And my father being... [laughs] I always say he's always been a pretty good drinker, he's always been always in touch with the farmers because they're the ones that made all the sake, and that was a source of sake for him. [Laughs] It's kind of a joke, but I felt that way. And during Christmas time, I remember my dad storing a lot of rice and soy sauce and sugar and stuff in the house. And right before Christmas, my dad and I would go out to these people on these farms and pass out these rice to these people like a gift. I never understood it at first, but my sister told me later on that, you know, it's sort of like a care package that he was giving away to the people in the valley. Because being farmers, they didn't have an income during the winter months, and my father was working in the sawmill, always had an income. And so we'd go out to the farms and every time before Christmas, delivered these goods and drink a little.

MA: And you said you went with him on these...

GM: Did what?

MA: You went with him when you delivered these?

GM: Yes, I did go with him because... well, I guess during my younger days, I used to drive his little tin can Ford, and he'd drink so much sometimes he'd make me drive home.

MA: What was the, how did the farmers receive these packages? Were they happy to be getting them?

GM: Well, it's not so bad because of the fact that, you know, they gave us vegetables and things, and we don't pay for it either, when we go visit them. It's sort of a gift that, repaying them, too. The Fife Japanese were very, very close together. It's, the families were close, and also the kids were very close as we grew up.

[Interruption]

MA: So we were just talking about when during Christmas time, your father would go and deliver these packages to the farmers, how you went with them.

GM: That's just one of the things. But I used to go to work with him during the summer months.

MA: At the sawmills?

GM: At the sawmill, uh-huh. And at the sawmill, there used to be a beach right across the street. And it was called the Tokyo Beach in Tacoma, and most of the Japanese kids in Tacoma used to walk down from the city down to the sawmill there, to the beach and play there, and swim and everything. And we used to draw quite a crowd there. And there was only a couple beaches you can go to that was, one was Point Defiance park and the other one was Steilacoom beach. And they were a little bit far for most of the kids down in the lower part of Tacoma, so they used to walk down to the Tokyo Beach. The beach is not there today because they dredged it out and it's all industrial, but it was a nice place. The sawmill is still there.

MA: Was your father... it sounds like he was more involved with the Fife farming community. Did he ever interact a lot with the sawmill, fellow sawmill workers?

GM: Well, really, he didn't interact with the farmers that much. We lived out there, my brother and sisters, we reacted with the kids, but my father was strictly a sawmill worker, and his friends were right at the saw-, living at the sawmill. And, but his home was in Fife.

MA: How far was your home from the sawmill where he worked?

GM: It was three miles, not too far. For the little car he had, it's, like I said, it was a really old Model T Ford, it was pretty far, especially during the strikes.

MA: During the labor strikes?

GM: During the strikes, the sawmill strikes, my father had to work in the sawmill. And the reason was the sawmills had to keep their fire going to, because they didn't want the fire to run out, because that's what controlled the, the steam that run all the motors and everything in the sawmill. And since my father, as a Japanese, was one of the few union men, he also had to go on the strike. And when he's not working in the sawmill during the strike, he's on the picket line in front of it. And the worst part of that was that when he was working in the sawmill, the strikers would put sugar in his gas tank. And, and we'd get about halfway home when the car stops running and we had to clean out the gas line and then get started again and go home.

MA: So your father was, he was a member of a, a union, you said?

GM: Yeah. In those days, there wasn't very many unions that would have Japanese.

MA: Which, do you remember which union it was?

GM: I don't know. AFL or CIO or whatever.

MA: But it was an interracial...

GM: Yeah, it's sawmills union, big union. But there was Japanese in the union. That was about the only place you could join the union. If you didn't join the union, you don't have a job, that's the other thing.

MA: Wow, that's interesting.

GM: I guess in those days, we never thought of it that, that interesting, it's just a matter of you had to have it. And we didn't think about other unions, but the other guys, as they grew up, found out that they couldn't get jobs because of, a good job, because if you weren't in a union, you couldn't get a job like driving trucks and things like that.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.