Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: George Yamada Interview
Narrator: George Yamada
Interviewer: Megan Asaka
Location: Spokane, Washington
Date: March 15 & 16, 2006
Densho ID: denshovh-ygeorge_2-01-0037

<Begin Segment 37>

MA: How was it coming back, moving back to Spokane from New York after twenty-odd years?

GY: Twenty-five, twenty-six years, gee, living in a big town, when you live in a community of 650, after we moved, it dropped down to four hundred, probably, you know. But gee, everybody knew us in, in a fifty-mile or maybe even a hundred-mile circumference. They all just about knew a Japanese family that lived there among a couple other Japanese families. And I enjoyed the fishing, I was on a ski patrol. I used to snow ski, and in order to make a little bit better, money-wise, I joined the ski patrol and was director of the ski patrol. I was paid professionally, I was paid money to ski patrol one year, and that's how bad business got, sexing. I was patrol, ski patrol during the wintertime, driving the truck, but anyway, I used to belong to a golf club, eighteen-hole golf course there. It was beautiful playing golf whenever I felt like it, it was beautiful going fly fishing whenever I felt like it. The activities there for the kids going to, in their band concert, school plays, and sports, it was very enjoyable because there wasn't a movie theater, it was just a small town. After we moved back here, we were just flabbergasted how much our town had changed, my wife and me.

MA: What were some things that stood out to you as being the most changed?

GY: Well, one-way streets, for one. I used to go down all those one-way streets in the opposite direction, I did that a number of times. And the freeway, I-90, going through town, dead, stopped dead on the street that we used to live on. And naturally, when... what's that word I'm trying to think of? When they, when you had these highways going through, they could take your house. See, there's a word for that.

MA: Repossess?

GY: No. Oh, gee whiz. Not repossess, but they take your house, they give you what they feel your land is worth. And anyway, it went right smack through a lot of the Japanese-owned housing, right smack through it. And took our church eventually, and blocked off the street, I-90 went right through where we lived then.

MA: Where did the Japanese families go, and where did the buildings...

GY: They all moved to various areas. South Hill and north side, more or less on the south side, South Hill. There were a few on the north side, few in the northeast corridor, but the money, money houses was primarily in the northwest corridor or the South Hill, all of the South Hill. Few out, way out in the valley, but it was a big change for us. We went to see a movie, we went to eat pizza, went to a Chinese restaurant, we were so amazed at the closeness of going to eat pizza. We had to go twenty miles or twenty-five miles to east pizza back in upstate New York, it was such a small town. And we just enjoyed our first year of coming back. And my, my wife used to take care of my mother, she had diabetes, so go over to the house every day and give her a shot, you know, insulin. After my mother died, we moved into their house and took care of my dad, and six months later he died, that was in 1981.

But anyway, up in, when we first moved back, we pulled a trailer full of our belongings, and we stopped over in Pennsylvania to, we stopped in New Jersey to see my army buddy from Portland, Oregon, and we stayed with them for a little while. But as it turned out, we left their house around one or two o'clock in the morning, and we headed out on the highway. On the turnpike in Pennsylvania I got groggy and fell asleep. And then the following morning I woke up -- this was in April 1975, and soon as I turned on the ignition, I proceeded down the highway, I hit a deer. [Laughs] Oh, boy. I, I looked in my rearview mirror and I could see it bouncing from... it hit the front end bumper, it didn't dent anything except maybe pushed the bumper in a little, and went over the top of the trailer that I was hauling, and I could see it bound away. I hope I didn't kill it. It was still, we just had started out that morning, and it was, it was early in the morning, daylight, I hit this darn deer. And like I told you earlier, I, that was my seventh deer that I hit. Much earlier they had thrown me out of the insurance, because I filed a claim on, comprehensive on every one of 'em. But anyway, that, we came back to Spokane, and that's where our second part of our lives started. I was completely out of chick sexing then, completely. I just quit.

MA: Was it nice to, when you moved back to Spokane, to see some of the childhood friends?

GY: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, you bet. Faces that I haven't seen, you got to figure from 1943 on, from going to Washington State to living in Chicago for a little, I was bumming around, you might say. Not bumming, but just trying to find myself. I lived in Chicago for not quite a year. I don't remember what, I guess that was in, yeah, just before I got into chick sexing. But anyway... I kind of lost my train of thought.

MA: Oh, that's okay. Oh, I was just, yeah, talking about the childhood friends.

GY: Oh, yeah, it was, it was just really nice seeing old-time friends I grew up with, missed certain friends also that were killed in the European Theater. But it was nice to get back after a quarter of a century.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.