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EY: And then something really interesting happens. This was during the Prohibition, and it turns out that the moonshiners were operating in that area, and the fishing village pooled their money and had one truck to take their fish from the village across the mountain into Chinatown where the fish market was so they could sell their fish. And so the moonshiners said, "Hey, we'll help you guys out if you take our moonshine over." And then they told my grandfather, apparently, "Well, since you're doing that, why don't you, in off-hours, tend the still also?" And so, of course, my grandfather got busted as a moonshiner. He really was, I think he was involved, but he was tangentially involved. And apparently the deal was, "Don't rat on us and we'll take care of your family." And so he didn't rat on them, and he went to prison because he wouldn't, he sort of took the fall. And so my dad remembers going to visit his father in prison. But he came out and was a convicted moonshiner, so that's part of my heritage, which most people don't know. [Laughs] And he would do his fishing. And one day a friend came by, and Sunday was my grandfather's day off, and the friend said, "I really want to go fishing for fun." And it was bad weather, but my grandfather took him out, and this storm came in and it capsized the boat. So my grandfather, there was one anchor chain, so he wrapped it around the other fellow so the fellow could kind of hang on to the boat, and he tried to hang on but he couldn't, so he drowned. So my dad was about eleven at the time, so four children, this poor village, no money, no resources.

But two interesting things happened. One is, the village, of course, came together to help them. And so my grandmother took over, there was one ofuro, one big bath, and so she would help run the bath and some people helped her. And my dad told me this, and at the time, Hawaii was a territory, but they did have some government assistance or welfare assistance. And this was a small rural community, and so I'm not quite sure how anyone ever figured out that this family really needed it and qualified, but they did. So he said that really helped him. And I really think what it was was they were teachers. My dad was very, very bright, and so he skipped a couple of grades in elementary school, and I think the teachers looked out for him and his family. But my dad started working as a fisherman at age eleven, and doing a lot of heavy lifting. He was a very tiny man, he was, his whole life, 5'1", 104 pounds, and he did this heavy lifting work. After sixth grade, that was the end, there was no more school in the area. But the teachers recognized that he had something special. So they arranged for my dad and maybe a few others, I'm not sure, to take this one taxi, one bus, that went across each day, one away and then back over the mountain. So he went to school, intermediate school, in town. And it was there that his world kind of expanded. He met kids from all over. And it was there that his teacher said, "Well, you folks are American citizens now, and there's a lot of discrimination." And the way Hawaii was was a two-class society. Essentially the plantation owners who controlled all aspects of Hawaii life, certainly finance, jobs, the economy, but also the media, also controlled politics, also controlled social life, who got in, who didn't. It's such a two-class society. And Japanese and the Chinese and the Korean, Filipino immigrants were at the bottom, although native Hawaiians, we learned later, actually get below that. And they were taught at this school, "You know, if you want to do better, you need to at least acknowledge your American identity," so they all adopted American names at that point. And it was then my father learned that the last name he had been going by, Yamaoka, was not actually his real family name. And his father had passed away by then. So I'm not sure that, all the dynamics, but the teachers helped him and he got the whole family name changed back to the correct name, Yamamoto. So he went from Katsuichi Yamaoka to George Yamamoto at that time.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.