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AI: Well, and now what about you, we left you at the same place and, when you had just received your draft orders.
TI: Yes, well, I got my orders to report to Fort Douglas, Utah, and that was dead of winter, right after January. They went through the process of getting inducted, then they sent me down to Fort Blanding, in Florida, for basic training. And the war was still going on -- this is 1945, by the way -- and the war was still going on. I took the basic training there, while the, I was still in basic training, the war in Europe ended. So, they kept us there in Florida for a while after our basic was completed, but... deciding what to do with the troops -- and by the way, these were all Japanese recruits, it was not a mixed group, we were, we were being groomed to be replacements for the 442nd -- but since the war ended, they didn't really have a plan for us.
But eventually, they decided to send us over to Europe as monitor police, to police the railroad cars that were shipping cargo in Europe. American supplies, that is. At the time, there was a lot of looting going on, on the railroads, especially for tobacco and things of... American-made goods. There were hot, black market items. And our jobs were to ride these trains, trooper train, supposedly to guard the cargo. And that's what we did, we were going from city to city, country to country, the small countries, Belgium, Netherlands -- well, not so small, Germany and France, and all the surrounding countries, and so we traveled extensively. We, I did that until 1946, and then the war effort being, winding down in Europe, they decided to send us back to the States. And, they were starting to let people return to their civilian life.
So I was discharged in, I think mid-summer of 1946. By that time, my family -- my brother, parents, and younger sister -- they were back in Bellevue again, and they had already started farming at the old family place. So, I was kinda loose, didn't really have any plans, so I just decided to join my brother, and we started farming. We bought additional property right above Midlakes, there. So we had our home place plus, plus the place where we bought, and we farmed together until 1953. And as was mentioned earlier, Safeway wanted to buy that area for their distribution center. So, I think negotiations went on almost all of 1953 but by late '53, almost everyone had sold out to Safeway and so, we decided to go along and sell also.
Well, at that time, I was still single, I decided to go to work for the post office because Kiyo Yabuki was already at the post office, and I believe he started maybe two years before. And there's a story behind that situation also, I'll just go into it briefly. There was no Japanese or other minority person working for the Bellevue post office. And keep in mind, Bellevue, it was still just a pretty small town, but it was starting to grow. Mr. Nixon was the postmaster in Bellevue, and Mrs. Belote was the assistant postmaster. And, well, I went to school with the Belote kids, they were twins, they were one year ahead of (me). But, Mr. Nixon didn't know what to do about the, Kiyo's application, he, Kiyo was a wounded World War II 442nd veteran, and so he had his veteran's ten point preference to get a civil service job. And so, from what I understand, Mr. Nixon polled some of the community leaders of Bellevue at that time, and asked them their opinion about hiring Kiyo. Well, evidently the response was favorable and Kiyo got the job.
And then, couple years down the road, when, as Bellevue was growing why, the post office was also expanding. So he came to me while I was kind of looking around, wondering what to do. And he says, "Hey, there's a opening at the Bellevue Post Office, why don't you put in an application, and see if you can get in?" So I put my application in, and then they, after a short period of time, they said, "Yeah, come to work." In those days, you didn't have to take the civil service test prior to getting the job. You could get the job, and then qualify for the job after you got the job on a temporary basis. And I'm sure that's how Kiyo got in, too. And, that's how I started, so eventually, well, I started as a sub, clerking, and then, eventually became a permanent employee there, and I wound up there, staying oh, thirty-some odd years, maybe thirty-five or thirty-six counting the camp time, which they allowed us to do later on. So I retired out of there, in 1984. So, I've been in and around Bellevue all my life, except for those two camp and military time.
<End Segment 41> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.