<Begin Segment 2>

LH: Yeah, that's one of the things that people always talk about is the fact that the weather when they -- during the war, no matter where they went to it was pretty unfamiliar to them. So your family was a farming family in central California?

FH: No, I was in the shipping business, we shipped fruit and vegetables. But wait a minute now, I take that back. Just before 1942, in 1939 my brother-in-law bought a chick sexing business. Do you know what that is? They separate baby chicks, male and female, and with it came a hatchery and a chicken farm, and he called me -- I was in Delano working in produce. And he called me and asked me to come down and help him and I decided I'd go down and help him. And I had to take charge of the chicken farm, chick sexing business and the hatchery business. I knew nothing about chickens and hatchery, or the chick sexing business. Of course, chick sexing business was sort of a supervisory deal. We had about thirty-six sexers, chick sexers, that we farmed out to hatcheries in the Midwest and East and we'd take a commission on the earnings. Now my brother-in-law, Ty Saiki, was in Mankato, Minnesota. That's about eighty miles southwest of the Twin Cities. And he ran the so-called eastern office of our business, and I was in Fresno running the whole darn thing. But come 1942, when they were going to, going to send us to the camps, well, we were all prepared to go.

But in 1942, our third child was born, in February of 1942. And until that time we were really preparing to go to camp, we had duffle bags and all the rest of that stuff, and then I began to think. No hospitals, maybe no doctors, and our new baby was kinda, not, kinda sickly a little bit, so I decided, "Well, I can't take my family to the camp." So I contacted the Western Defense Command in San Francisco and I told him the circumstances, and I told him I had a place to go to in Minnesota, the eastern end of our business. And finally after about ten days they sent us a permit to go, and that was just about a week before our area was supposed to go to the camp.

So we just barely made it, so I think about July 11th or so we set out for Minnesota, we had two cars. I had my father, my mother, my sister, my sister-in-law, our three little kids, my wife, and myself. So in two cars we headed for -- and then we had a Ford pickup with a trailer and we had some German friends of ours, who loaded it up with business equipment and all. They went up 99 to Reno and there we met them. They wouldn't allow us to go up 99 because that was the dividing line between the so-called forbidden area and the free area. I thought at the time it was a free area. They wouldn't let us go up 99 to Reno, so we had to go through Yosemite and what's the name of that pass, Tioga Pass, I think. And that's just a narrow one road trail and every time somebody came by, you had to back up into a cove and let them go by.

And we set out and we stopped in a place called Carson City, and that evening, it was towards evening by that time and I tried to get a room for the whole bunch of us, you know. So I went to a motel that didn't look too first class, thinking that we would have a better chance at getting a room there. They refused us rooms, said, "You Japs from California?" "Yes." And they wouldn't give us rooms, so then I went to the best hotel in Carson City and they gave us rooms. We stayed there that night, next day we went to Reno. The pickup, in the meantime, went to Reno up 99 we met them there. And I had some people coming from Minnesota to come over and drive the pickup. So we all met in Reno, and from there the two people that brought the pickup they went back home and then these fellows came from Minnesota, they took over the pickup and trailer to drive to Minnesota. That night we went to, from Reno to Winnemucca, you know where that is? Well, in Winnemucca, we knew that there was a hotel there run by Japanese, because our chick sexers used to stop by there. But this Japanese, well, we went to him, and just as we were entering Winnemucca, a truck load of white guys went by -- "Go back to California, you damn Japs!" -- you know. And the women and kids were there. And so we went to this Japanese fellow and he gave us rooms. But below the rooms was sort of a saloon. I guess he owned that, too, or something. Anyway, all that night, there was a lot of noise and I couldn't sleep because I didn't know what was going to happen, kinda scared. Fortunately, nothing happened. And the next day we went to Salt Lake, and from Salt Lake to Des Moines, Iowa, and then to Minnesota, so we made the trip.

So here we were going to Mankato, a town of about 20,000, and fortunately for us I guess there was a lot of German Americans there, German descent, and during World War I these Germans took a beating. Yeah, they were called all kinds of names, and spit on and all that kind of stuff because they were the enemy. But in our case, the German Americans were very friendly, because they knew what we were going through because they went through it themselves. And for five and a half years we stayed in Mankato, Minnesota, and our kids went to school there. And after about five and a half years I told my brother-in-law, "I can't stay with you, I'm just working for a monthly salary and I've got to get busy and start accumulating something for the kids to go to school." So I quit him and came back to California. That was in winter of 1947.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.