Densho Digital Archive - Bessie Yoshida Konishi Interview (denshovh-kbessie-01-0007)

<Begin Segment 7>

MA: Going back to Alamosa, your father's farm there. He also, it was a produce farm that he started in Alamosa?

BK: Uh-huh, uh-huh. It was a vegetable farm.

MA: Vegetable farm.

BK: Uh-huh, and so we all worked on there, on the farm along with the migrant workers. And as soon as we got home from school, we'd change our clothes, eat a snack, and then we'd go out in the field and work alongside. And even after we graduated from high school, most of my sisters went to sewing school in Denver, because my dad didn't think girls needed more education than high school. And besides there were ten girls, and he couldn't afford to send ten of us to college. And so they would go to sewing school in the winter months and then come back in the summer months and work on the farm until they were married. And when my turn came, when I graduated from high school, I said, "I'm not going to sewing school 'cause I already know how to sew and I'm gonna run away if you send me to sewing school." [Laughs] And so they let me go to business school, but I had to stay with a Japanese family the first year. And then my sister was married by then, so I lived with her for the next winter. So I did that two winters and then came back on the farm, worked on the farm in the summer. And then the third winter, I worked at a carpet company in Denver. And I remember going to an employment agency and being told that, "It's very hard to find jobs for you people. But once you're hired, they really like you." And this was 1952? 1952, yeah. So I went back to Barnes Business School and they found a job for me, so I did that, that winter. And then the following year, 1953, I got married.

MA: Going back to the farm, so you would work maybe, all the siblings would work after school and on the weekends.

BK: Oh, yeah.

MA: What types of things would you do?

BK: Well, we grew lettuce, cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, and a few potatoes. And the lettuce has to be cut early in the morning, early in the morning. So we'd wake up crack of dawn, my dad would wake us up. And we'd be out there cutting the lettuce. And cauliflower, cauliflower leaves have to be tied up so they don't turn yellow, so the cauliflower don't turn yellow. And we would walk through and cut those, we'd be lifting up fifty pounds of potatoes and loading them on. Yeah, we worked hard. We worked hard. But it didn't hurt us, it was good for us.

MA: Who did your father sell the produce to?

BK: (There) used to be big produce trucks that would come in and load 'em up and take 'em, I would assume to grocery stores and places like that, yeah. But I remember big semi-trucks just lined up. We'd load 'em on there.