Densho Digital Archive - Mary Hamano Interview (denshovh-hmary

<Begin Segment 22>

MA: Where did you live when you first moved to Denver with your family?

MH: I lived in a little home, it was a big home. At one time, it was a big home and in the back, they had a carriage. It was a horse and buggy days, I think. And it was a brick building and it had two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs, which was, there was a big window. Bigger than that, double the size of that mirror there, it must have been a hay loft where they put the hay in and they had horses and buggies in those. It was a carriage place. It was converted to a living quarter, somebody had put it together. And it didn't have any bathrooms, but we had running water, that's all. And didn't have no gas, so we had to use oil, kerosene, to do our cooking. And temporary, somebody found this for us, so we decided we'd live there 'til we could find a permanent place.

MA: What neighborhood was that? Was it near Japantown?

MH: No, it's quite a ways from Japantown. I guess about a mile, good mile, better than a mile. Near Curtis Park. Curtis Park is in that Larimer Street end of town there. We used the front apartment as our, to take a bath, they had that open for us to use. So we just had the kitchen to cook, and this kerosene stove. And then we lived there for just a few months and then a friend of ours had a garage, and they lived upstairs of this garage. And garage is still there. It's called, it was called a modern garage. And this tiny family, were very good friends of ours. And so, they had bought a house on north side of town, other side of town, and they said, "The garage and upstairs apartment is open, so if you would like to live there, you can live there." So we decided to move there. And that's when I got married, from there. I lived there and so I had to be... oh, '45, '46, '47, '48, '49, we left in '50. So we lived in that for at least a few years. 'Cause we lived there when we lived in that apartment above the garage. Well, first we got married and I lived in another apartment, but I started to live in with my parents, after we got married. They were kind of lonely, so they wanted us to move in with them, 'cause there was extra rooms there. So we decided to live with them. So that's why we ended up living in the garage, above the garage. That's where our first was living there. And then, I came back and lived with them, too.

MA: During that --

MH: Then my father died the same year that I got married that year. So he passed on in December. I got married in January.

MA: What year?

MH: 1947. And he died in December of '47. And so, I had, and then the following year, I had a miscarriage. That's the reason, I didn't go to his funeral. And so the following year, '48, and '49, my son was born. And '49, March the 25th.