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TI: Okay, so let's go back to the hotel. So on the second and third floor of this building were the rooms for the hotel. So what would your mother do? She had to run this, so what kind of things would she do to run the hotel?

RY: Well, we, they started renting to a lot of loggers that come up. And in the wintertime they'd, they rented to a lot of loggers. And these loggers always came in with bedbugs or lice and things like that. So nothing but, well, insecticide, my mother used to use, spread every day, every night, and every day she'd spread the insecticide to kill the bugs. In fact, when I had to help, help sometimes, she'd tell me how to, how to take care of the bugs. You know, those mattresses had, had edges on it, and he says, "Look under there real close." [Laughs] Yes, but I don't know, that insecticide smelled, but I don't know why the loggers came back all the time, though. Because, you know, once, once those, they get insecticide, the bugs start to stay away. And I don't know why, but it never got into my bed. [Laughs] And the bedbugs or something, lice and stuff, but they bring it back from the logging camps. But that's what my mother took care of, making the sheets and stuff.

But we also had some Orientals living there steady, and we had, I remember two, two Chinese bachelors that used to stay there. And they used to, well, there's one of 'em that was a really good cook, he taught me how to eat some Chinese food, and we got along real well. He was, I guess he was as old as I am now. [Laughs] But we used to, he used to take me into his kitchen and give me some of his food, and he was a real good cook.

TI: And when you say "his kitchen," did the rooms have kitchens?

RY: Yeah. Well, this one, he had a kitchen and a bedroom, and two separate rooms. But yeah, some of the, some of the rooms had kitchens in it. That's like the family, when the Japanese family, they all had, there was two of 'em that had, had kitchens. And one bathroom on each floor; I don't know how they got along that way, but they had only one bathroom on each floor. And I don't know, that's all I had. I mean, I had to go into that public bathroom that we had. But seems how we got in there, and my dad had to keep up the furnace to keep the hot water coming up, and that was another chore. They used to get the split, four-foot long split lumber and use it to put into the furnace. And they, they used to, when they brought the lumber, it was piled in between the Dempsey Hotel and our hotel, and it was sort of a pathway or alleyway going down into the basement. And every so often, well, every winter, as far as that goes, we'd have, I think it was one corridor that they get piled up in between the two houses. And then when we had to place, throw it into the basement one at a time, and then from there, we had, my father would start the fire at night and well, it's not just lumber, and then when we had coal, we had a coal chute that used lumber to start and then put the coals in. I knew how to do it because my brother used to do it before he went to university, then that was my chore after that. [Laughs] So it was, I don't know... seemed like as soon as my brother left, I had more chores to do. [Laughs]

TI: Well, it sounds like there were, yeah, lots of activities.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.