<Begin Segment 23>

BH: So let's go back to his childhood. When he was young, his family was very poor.

KH: Yes, they were.

BH: And they lived by the river in a shack at one point, right?

KH: Uh-huh, it was a one-room shack by the river. Then Aunt Tosi got scarlet fever, so they moved inland, away from the river. And when I met Joe and went to his family, they had three, four room house.

BH: And at one point, you said that Joe's father, he had a farm and he was planning to, with the money from the crop, move the family back to Japan.

KH: He was leasing a farm, and he had raised a real good crop of green beans, and they were going to have harvesters come in the next day to harvest the green beans. And during the night, they had a big hailstorm, and the hailstorm, the hail was so big, he said, that it just ruined the crop. And the family really had a hard time because they had borrowed money to raise that crop, and they had to repay that.

BH: And so that sort of thwarted his plan to bring the family back to Japan.

KH: Yeah, he was gonna bring the family back to Japan, and Joe says he's very happy that the crop was ruined.

BH: So after that, what did his father do for work, do you know?

KH: He used to clean out ditches and do odds and end jobs. I remember when I went there that he was cleaning out irrigation ditches.

BH: Now, Joe, when he went to school, let's jump ahead to his graduation.

KH: He was sixteen years old when he was, would have graduated, but his birthday was at the end of June. He did skip a grade, and I guess he was pretty bright, because he would get his homework done and he'd still be in study hall. So what he would do is pick up the encyclopedia, and he started with A and read the entire encyclopedia.

BH: And all that work showed, he graduated second in his class?

KH: Yes, he was the salutatorian. But it was a small class; I don't think there were, not more than eight in the graduation class.

BH: Okay.

KH: But I have to tell a story about him on that, because he, he was not there at his graduation. He met a Italian family named Nick Esposito, and Nick had stopped into Joliet, and Nick was a hobo. And he told Joe that he was taking off that day of the graduation as a hobo again, and he asked Joe if he wanted to go with him. And Joe thought about it, he says, "Well," he says, "I'm graduating. What am I gonna do after I graduate? And if I stay home, it's one more mouth for the family to have to feed." So he said, "Okay," and he took off with Nick Esposito as a hobo and rode rails. And he said the one experience that he remembers is being picked up by a sheriff and told by the sheriff that they were going to be rounding up all the hobos in the Salt Lake area, and he says that, "You don't belong in that group." And the sheriff took him and put him in jail and gave him a, a cot. He wasn't marked down as a vagrant or anything like that, but it was for his protection. When they had that round up, Joe was not in that bunch. And then from there, I don't know where he went, but he did go up as far as Oregon.

BH: So he was, he was a hobo, he was hopping trains, then?

KH: Yes.

BH: And moving around from the freight train. And that was between 1933 and 1934?

KH: Let's see, he graduated in 1934.

BH: Oh, so '34 and '35.

KH: Uh-huh. But according to some of the records that I have checked, he did go to a school in Billings for about three months before he went to CCC. So I don't know how long he really was a hobo.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.