<Begin Segment 3>

MA: Where did you live when you were growing up in Spokane? What neighborhood?

MM: Oh, let's see. We, the first house that we lived in -- 'course, I was a youngster then -- was on... well, it was right on Pacific... let's see. Second or Third and Pacific.

MA: Was that downtown?

MM: That's downtown, more or less. It only took about ten minutes to get, walk downtown, and then we moved to an apartment, and that apartment is no longer there because that's been so many years. And then we moved, then my folks bought the hotel that we were living, and that was right in town, but it's no longer there because the new businesses are up. And I would say we lived there the longest.

MA: In the hotel?

MM: In the hotel, down, right down in town. And the only nice thing about it was that the busses, you didn't have to take a bus because the hotel was right downtown. And it's different now. I mean, you can't live down in, downtown, in fact, there aren't that many anyway. But there are some, but then they're really nice ones now, you know.

MA: Oh, hotels?

MM: Yeah, uh-huh.

MA: What are your memories of that area around your hotel and that sort of neighborhood?

MM: Well, you know, we never had any kind of problems, and the war wasn't even on yet. And the hakujins, we just seemed to kind of flow in and got along fine with them. And then not only that, there are quite a few Nihonjin-no hotels and laundries, and there were some restaurants, barber shops, so it wasn't like there, one family that moved in, they were strange, it wasn't like that at all. It was really, really like they, we'd grown up with them. There was one Chinese family that lived down there, but they were the only ones that were really -- there were some adults, but not a family like that. They had a boy and a girl, but we always got along.

MA: What did the Chinese family do? Did they own a business?

MM: They had a... let's see. There were three or four Chinese restaurants, and the food was delicious. [Laughs] They... then there was, there were a lot of single Chinese men, and then there were some of those places where they... I don't know if you should publish this or not, but like they played baccape.

MA: What's that?

MM: It's some kind of Chinese word for gambling; they had gambling houses, you know. But we never fought with them, or we always got along with the Chinese people.

MA: Were those gambling houses sort of interspersed around that neighborhood, or was there one, like, street where they were all at?

MM: They were, it was more in the alley, you know. They alleys -- it sounds terrible, but the alleys in those days weren't like alleys... like now, you wouldn't think of going to an alley now, you know. But in those, in those days, they never had such things as rapes or kidnapping or anything like that. So we used to play in the, in the alley, especially that one alley.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.