<Begin Segment 15>

MA: So I want to talk a little bit more about your, your farming experience in Texas and, I imagine Texas being so close to, to Mexico, you had a lot of... were a lot of your laborers who worked there Mexican?

GF: We had a lotta laborers there. You know, those days are pretty early so I think the minimum wage at that time was 50 cents an hour. So we got labor for 50 cents an hour which we thought was pretty cheap. It wasn't cheap, but still cheap enough. And so down in south Texas my main crop there was cotton. Raising cotton. And then it was carrots because I had got in touch with these Campbell soup and Gerber and all those. I could raise carrots 'cause they wanted carrots. And I also raised onion and cabbage and lettuce. And that was my farming down there.

MA: So how were the Mexican laborers treated by people? Was there a lot of discrimination against them?

GF: Well, the ones that we used we... I don't know that they were because they were, we were close the river. They done their work and they're gone. So, I don't know whether the hakujin people discriminated 'em or not, I don't really know.

MA: So they would kind of work seasonal and then go back home?

GF: Right. Uh-huh.

MA: Were there, was there a Japanese community in, where you were, in that area of Texas?

GF: Well, within about a 60 mile area there was, I'm gonna say there was about fourteen Japanese families. So, today the farming not good and even some of the better farmers in, down in the valley, they're not there anymore. They're not farming.

MA: And were most of these Japanese families, they had been there for a while? Or had they come more recently like you?

GF: No. Some of 'em was there for a while. But there was... oh, I'm gonna say maybe half of those Japanese people were evacuees. And they went down there to farm.

MA: Oh, after, after camp?

GF: After the war, uh-huh. Of course they, they went down there just ahead of me. See, I didn't get there until '52 and some of those were there a little bit earlier. And some of the fellows that I met, they were from Poston, Arizona and so forth. And they come from the relocation center and they're down there farming.

MA: So you kind of became friends with some of them?

GF: Oh, yes. In fact, most of the Japanese people down there become friend because half of 'em was foreigners, too. They were not all native Japanese.

MA: How, how were you treated by the white folks in Texas, in general?

GF: I didn't have any problems. I don't, I don't think... I don't believe any farmers in that area were mistreated badly after the war. The only time I heard that there was one, one Japanese guy coming from work -- this was already, right at Pearl Harbor time -- this hakujin guy caught him coming out and shot him, killed him. And that was in close to the place that I got the farm. And I heard about it after I got there. It was a Japanese family by name of Date. And he was killed coming out but, back then, it was right after the war so they didn't do nothin' to this American guy.

MA: Right. So you farmed for a long time after, right, for a couple decades in Texas before you opened your bowling alley?

GF: No, not really. I, I might have farmed all together, if I put them all together in a period, it might be about 10 years. That's only one decade. [Laughs]

MA: One decade, okay.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.