<Begin Segment 5>

MA: And this hotel was called the World Hotel?

GY: The first hotel my folks owned was the World Hotel.

MA: And that was, you said, right downtown?

GY: Uh-huh.

MA: Where all the other Japanese businesses were?

GY: Yeah, right now the District 81 school headquarters. And then the second hotel we owned was the Logan Hotel. And from what everybody tells me, Logan was known throughout the country for a lot of the guys that stopped in Spokane, they stayed at the Logan.

MA: Oh, I wonder why, why it was so popular.

GY: Well, I think it was right off the railroad, and the railroad used to be one of the busiest things in Spokane, railroad. And it provided people going through, they were called transients. But those transients also had a few dollars in their pockets. They, I remember when we lived in the small house, these transients would come by and say, knock on the door and says, "Can I chop wood for you or clean your yard for a meal?" And these were those transients. I think for the most part, they were trustworthy and loyal. That type of society then, of course, the doors were always unlocked in that period, we went to sleep without locking the door, and it was that, that time of, the period that time that we felt reasonably safe.

MA: Can you describe, I guess, the neighborhood around there, around your hotel, around where you grew up? What was that like, that neighborhood?

GY: Well, we lived right over Garney's Tavern. We had to go through Garney's Tavern to get to the basement to stoke the fire to build the steam to heat the hotel and the hot water, and there was a huge boiler, huge fire box. And I used to remember I had to feed it coal, huge chunks of coal to bank it so it would stay hot throughout the night to make hot water and heat.

MA: How long did that usually take, to heat the water?

GY: The heat? I'm not sure now. We put the coal in there, I think it, you could hear the banging away of the pipes. The banging away of the pipes is due to the fact that there was a vacuum created in the pipe. It wasn't a continuous stream of water, and whenever the heat came up, you could hear the pipes banging away, I mean a large bang. I don't know quite how you explain banging, but a lot of noise emanated from those pipes. And it didn't bother us, we were young, so you know, noise didn't bother us, I guess.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.