<Begin Segment 35>

AI: So you went back to camp after the season.

TI: Yes. I went back to camp, but Joe stayed out in the Ogden area.

AI: And then what did you do? After that.

JM: I worked at a lot of little odd jobs, I, whatever I could get. I worked for a while at the sugar factory, after the sugar was processed, why, they made it into sugar. I worked in a warehouse, but this was night work. And we'd have to stack the sacks of sugar -- they're 100-pound sacks -- so they were about 30 feet square, I think. Sacks square, see. And so they came, come off of a endless belt. As they were, there was about six of us -- or, maybe, maybe five or six of us -- and we'd have to take the sacks of sugar and place it in these rows. And eventually the stacks'd get higher and higher. But, you're constantly walkin' back and forth to place the sacks of sugar, and if you've missed one, and it dropped on the stack, why, you'd have to pick it up. Here comes another one. Well, you're running all the time that way. And so, that was real hard work. A 100 pounds, I guess I, it wasn't much to pick up then. I got so that one -- we didn't get no breaks, you know. It was four hours during the night, and just for lunch break, we'd stop. But, you're on the verge of passing out, because it was hard work. The first couple of days you just ache all over.

Then I worked a little bit in the seed warehouse; that lasted, oh, a couple of months. Then I got a job in the town there at the brickyard. And all I was doing is takin' the bricks off of one pallet and puttin' it over on another pile. [Laughs] All day long, I bought a brand new pair of leather gloves, I wore it out in half a day. And I left, I went back to the hotel, and I never come back. Didn't even go back for my money. And that was really a, I don't know what you'd call it, it wasn't really hard, but you're getting nowheres. So then I got a job in the, with the American Can Company. And I was stacking empty cans for these canneries. But that one was another of those jobs where it's repetitious. So you have these fork, it looks like a rake with the tines sticking straight out, and all you do is, as the cans came down the conveyor, why, you'd stick these prongs in there and stack 'em wherever you wanted to. And that was all night long, noisy. Well, I toughed it out until, until my orders came through, my draft number came up.

AI: Was that 1943, sometime? When you're...

JM: That was... yeah, I think it was in '43.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.