<Begin Segment 6>

MA: What did your family do for fun? Like maybe you had a day off from the laundry, or a holiday...

MT: My dad was a fisherman, and he used to go fishing every chance he got on the weekends. So he would take us to, Hayden Lake is a real pristine lake at that time, and then we had Pend Oreille Lake is a beautiful, beautiful place. And quite a few in the neighborhood, we would all go as a caravan over to those places, and some of the ladies would make the rice on a camp stove. It was fun days. That's the kind of... we didn't do much -- except there was a lot of theaters, five-cents, Unique, Tommix. [Laughs]

MA: What kind of theaters, like, movie?

MT: Movie theaters. We had a lot of them around in there, and also above, well, at the end of the block on the block where my laundry, my father's laundry was was a hotel named Galax, and then that was quite a fancy place, and they had ferns growing inside, real pretty, even had an elevator. Then you go up the block, one block up, and there was a theater named Empress. And all these famous people, famous movie stars would come, they'd perform there and stay at the Galax.

MA: What sorts of movie stars? Who came to Spokane?

MT: I betcha, I can't remember because, but I know that that's what happened. They'd stay at that hotel and they'd go perform up above at Empress. And my dad would take us sometimes.

MA: To the shows at the Empress?

MT: Show, uh-huh. And you know, like I say, the theaters were five-cents, ten-cents in those days. Then it got be a little bit more, and we'd get out of church and make a beeline down to, down to town to go to Liberty Lake -- Liberty Theater where they let us in cheaper if we got in at a certain time. [Laughs]

MA: What about things like, did the Japanese American community have, maybe, festivals or any sort of big community picnics?

MT: Yes, we had that picnic I told you about, and I have, remember this one fellow, Mr. Yoshida, Harry Yoshida, would get a big megaphone and he'd da-da-da-da, he just staccato-like, say, talk in Japanese, whatever's next coming on. And they had one where the women all lined up. It's amazing, and they'd have a lantern -- no, they don't. They have a match, I guess, and then they run down to the end there and get the lanterns, the kind you pull up, accordion, and then light the match and then bring it to the thing, and whoever gets to the other end wins. Yeah, and I won some pearl necklace or something, not real, but you know, the cheap stuff. But they were fun. At Audubon, Audubon Park was where they had a lot of them. Minnehaha, we have a place called Minnehaha, and they used to have a park, our undokais and things there.

MA: Is Minnehaha, that's the name of the park?

MT: Uh-huh. Minne... and then, I don't know if it's one word or not. I don't think so. Well, anyway.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.