<Begin Segment 5>

MA: So during this time, your family had a grocery store, right? So your father wasn't doing shoe repair?

MH: Well, then after that, the big Safeways and the supermarkets started to pop around the neighborhood. And people were going to where they could get better bargains. So naturally, the small business were kind of going down. So he quit and he went back to the shoe repairing. So by the time war started, he was in the shoe business. So I guess it would be in the mid -- I was in junior high already, so it had to be around '35. '34, '35, somewhere around there.

MA: So back when he had the grocery store, who were the, and I guess in your community, your neighborhood in general, who were the customers? Was it just people in the neighborhood that would stop by?

MH: Just people in the neighborhood. We had all kinds of people. We had people from Europe, like I assume they were Polish people or Czechoslovak. And then we had mostly Caucasians, and a few, not too many Spanish people. But we had a few black people and they, too, was very scattered. Mostly Caucasian, uh-huh.

MA: Did you help out at the store, at the grocery store? Did you work there?

MH: I, no, I didn't tend to it very much because I was too young to take care of a lot of things. So I just watched the store when they had to leave to go eat or something and then I didn't do any, and in particular, I didn't really work there. When they were busy, I did help wrap up stuff or pack up stuff for them. But mostly, they did it themselves.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.