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MA: I've heard a lot about Trent Alley. And what are your memories of Trent Alley?

GY: Trent Alley to us is, you might say we kind of grew up in the alley system. Where we played, it was one, a long alley that every day you would see a big cart, some worker would be pushing his cart loaded with food. Breakfast for one, lunch for another, and supper. And they would be hauling that to the city jail. And the city jail was located, parts of it was located on Trent Alley, on the west end. That's were the City Hall was, where several Niseis worked there at City Hall, right in downtown. It's not in downtown now, so to speak, it's away from downtown a little ways. But this building housed prisoners, emergency hospital. The reason I'm familiar with the emergency hospital is during my time as night clerk in one of the hotels that we owned, I got in a fight with an individual, the fight ended up outside. I was going to high school, and I didn't have any shoes on. I don't know if I even had slippers on, but the fight in front of the first -- not the ground floor but the first floor where the offices were, I threw him out from there, and we ended up fighting in the streets. And a patrol car came by and arrested him for disturbing the peace, I believe it was. And I was hit on the head, hit on the head with a beer bottle several different times. I didn't even feel it, but as I went back upstairs, my mother was waiting for me at the top of the stairs and saw blood streaming down my scalp. And we, she called the cops back and they took me to emergency hospital there where I had a whole bunch of stitches put in. And the following day, I was playing football then for high school, and the following day, in the newspaper, "George Yamada beat up." [Laughs] I didn't think I lost the fight. I knew I had the upper hand, but they called it, "George Yamada beaten up," or something like that. I got quite a ribbing in high school. Even that day happened to be squad pictures taken of us in uniform, football. Here I am with a big white patch on the side of my head where they shaved it and stitched it. It was just one of those memorable moments. [Laughs]

MA: That's funny. You were saying earlier that you played a lot in the alleys, and you spent a lot of time in the alleys. What sorts of things went on the alleys?

GY: Well, there was a Chinese restaurant, Washington Noodle, and I used to remember a square small box, fruit box, I don't know, where the Chinese guy had that box leaning on a stick. And the stick was tied to a string, and on the ground was grain or corn or whatever to keep, to have the pigeons come in there. And he would pull the string, the box would hopefully fall on the pigeon, and he would slaughter the pigeon I guess. I never saw it, but I couldn't help but to think there was no other purpose for that trap to be sprung so that he could have pigeon soup or pigeon drop soup or whatever the Chinese cooks managed out of a pigeon. I also -- although I never seen them, seen them capture a pigeon, that's what they did. However, I did see them slaughter chickens. They had a half a dozen chickens as I recall, they bent the head back under the wing, the wing locked their head in, and with a sharp knife slit the throat, threw the chicken on the ground, the chicken was flopping all over the place with the blood coming out. [Laughs] But that's the, that's what we observed. We were kids.

MA: And you said there were Chinese places around the alleys. What were your interactions like with the Chinese families?

GY: We got along good with them. We never fought or called each other names. It was only after Pearl Harbor came along that they started wearing "I am a Chinese" button or sign indicating they were Chinese, or telling us after all these years that we used to eat there, "Don't come back here. If you do, you won't know that we spit in your food." So with that story going around, I never went back to this Chinese restaurant. After the war I think we did, you know, a bunch of us guys, we had a place where you could get a good spaghetti dish for thirty-five cents, real delicious, good spaghetti. They sold olive oil primarily, and Chinese food. I don't know where we had the money, but we had enough money for several of us guys to eat Chinese food or spaghetti. And oh, we had second-hand shops, the back door ended up in Trent Alley.

MA: How did the, how did the Chinese community compare with the Japanese community in terms of size?

GY: They were smaller, much smaller. Let's see, we only had during that period probably Washington Noodle, Noodle Grill, two, three... I don't know, four or five Chinese restaurants. Let's see. We used to shoot marbles in Trent Alley, and Tenkoku... there was a name, I thought we gave it a Japanese, there was a Japanese name where you dig holes, one, two, three, four, five, like a cross, and you shoot to get your marble into the hole. And I know we did a lot of that, marbles, playing marbles. We played catch, there were... oh, let's see, one, two, three, four Nisei girls, and I don't know, half a dozen Nisei boys. And we just all got along together, no problem. The girls stayed on their own, and we primarily did a lot of bike riding, you know, us guys.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.