Densho Digital Archive - Mary Hamano Interview (denshovh-hmary

<Begin Segment 24>

MA: So let's talk about, you said you moved to L.A. in 1950.

MH: Oh, in 1950, we decided to make, take a move and go back to see if L.A. is where we want to stay. That's where we originally came from. So my husband says, and then he had his father with him and I had my mother, and then my brother also, and his wife. We decided to make a move and try and go see how it's like to settle in L.A. again. Well, we got there, we found a house, and we called it Boyle Heights area, it's what they call East Los Angeles. It was, when we moved that first house, there's a Hollenbeck Park one block down, south from us. And then, the Jewish people, a lot of refugees were in, right that time. And they spoke a lot of Jewish in that neighborhood. And then there was quite a few Japanese living in there, too, scattered in that area. And I lived there from '50 to '53. In the meantime, I had my second son there. And the Japanese hospital's just a few, is down not too far from us, several blocks down on First Street. So I went, I had a Japanese doctor. And then Dr. Baba and I went to the Japanese hospital and had my second son. And there, I was able to eat Japanese food because it was more or less for Japanese people to, originally built for that purpose, you know. For the Issei people to be more comfortable.

MA: And this was at the hospital?

MH: Yeah, at the hospital. The original hospital was down on First Street and it was a very creepy place. But eventually, the doctors all got together and they built their own hospital which was only two story. But it was nice. And they had quite a busy doings in those days, 'cause a lot of Japanese were living. And so I, I had my second child there. And then, eventually, we found a bigger house, so we moved on the other side of town. In the, what was that street? Vendome? It was near Silverlake area, what we called the Silverlake area. And, and this house was owned by a well-known family. He later passed on recently. The Niseis of the family had the house, and we rented that house. And we didn't have a Japanese community, or residents in that area. We were the only ones.

MA: What was your husband doing for work at that point?

MH: He was already doing landscaping. And he had started to do landscaping. And then, we, he was doing very well. But the traffic and the smog was getting us. The smog was worse than anything else. Because the boys were, it irritated their eyes, and their health was beginning to show. If they go out, they complain about how they feel. And so they're inside the house and that's not good either. So eventually, we decided we'd go back to Colorado. He said the Colorado air is so much better, and it's clearer, and we don't have the smog like you see, you'd see the sun through that smog and it was that bad. And you can tell that that's not healthy for kids, or any grownup, too. But people are living there and making a living. And we tried to visit the people, they're too busy raising families and they've lost everything, too, so they're makeup for all the losses they had in the past. And they had no time for socializing things like we expected. And it wasn't the same. So my husband said, "Well, let's go back to Colorado, where it's a little more ease and people are more friendlier." And so we decided that we'd go back after 1953. We ended up working in a greenhouse.

MA: Where was this?

MH: In La Junta, Colorado.

MA: And where is that geographically in Colorado?

MH: It's right near where the camp is. It's only about maybe sixty miles or not even that long. 'Cause I think it was sixty miles to Pueblo. It's Pueblo. Pueblo is the biggest town west. And we're going east towards Lamar area. So that's a halfway between Lamar and Pueblo, sorta halfway. It took a good hour to get from Pueblo to where we lived. And then it took another hour to go to Lamar. So we were kinda in the middle, on that, they call that Arkansas Valley, that area. And the water situation is not very good there. It's too much alkaline. We were having a little problem to get used to the water there, too. And the plant raising was difficult because of the hard water. Eventually, we were able to solve how to raise plants with difficulty. My husband had to go to Fort Collins to, to this gardening, something to do with gardening to take a lesson. And he had to go every week for so many weeks. To know more about the soil and the water situation, and what kind of plants are suitable for our area. And the different Colorado, in Colorado, it's all different, high altitude and low altitude. And so he went to training for that, and to help the people with their problems with their gardening or whatever.