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TI: Okay, so we're going to go into the second hour, Tosh. So we had just, you had just talked a little bit about the farmer's market and time you spent there. Let's go back to Renton and, again, some of the childhood memories like, for instance, fishing, berry picking, tell me about, first, fishing. What kind of fishing did you do?

TO: I think they were cutthroat that we fished. But the fishing was, really you couldn't call it fishing, lot more like trapping the fish. You'd just take the hook and put a worm on it and just leave it there in the creek, you know. We didn't even have a pole, we'd just have a line out there and drag the fish in. Every hour or so you'd go down there, or whatever time you want to go down there, and drag the fish out. Of course, that's certainly illegal, but at that time, there wasn't anything illegal. And, of course, the salmon would just, in the fall, would just come up in droves. And we'd go down there and take a pitchfork and bring 'em in, but they weren't any use for anyone. So we did it for a while, but there wasn't any use. My dad would use it for fertilizer and bury it someplace. One thing that I distinctly recall was we had pets, dogs, and one of our dogs that was one of our favorites, liked to kill chickens. And, of course, the neighbors all had chickens, and this dog would kill chickens. So my dad asked the neighbor to get rid of the dog, to kill that dog. So I took the dog over to the neighbor's. The neighbor says, "Well, you go with me?" Out into the woods and they shot that, shot that, killed that dog. Oh, man, it really bothered me. It really made me sad for a long time, you know. But that was typical farm situation. You couldn't have a dog that was killing chickens. I remember for Easter, one of the neighbors, an Italian family, real nice Italian family, he was raising rabbits and selling them. But they gave us, me and my sister, a little rabbit for Easter. We had it in a cage, and we'd feed it, and, of course, rabbits grew pretty fast. So pretty soon my dad -- I think the rabbit got out of the cage, my dad said, "We got to have that, have it butchered." So he didn't want to do it, of course, Mom didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. So they said, "Well, take it up to the Italian neighbor and have him butcher it for us." He said, "Oh, yeah, I'd be happy to." So he butchered it, cleaned it, and had it all ready for us, my mom to cook. I just couldn't eat rabbit. To this day, I can't eat rabbit because of what happened. [Laughs]

TI: So for city folks, your life was a lot different. So things like cutting chicken heads off, butchering of rabbits, but also a pet. I mean, if a pet would kill chickens, you would have to have your pet killed.

TO: That's right.

TI: These are probably all things that would be different for people who grew up in the city.

TO: It wasn't uncommon in those days, you know, that you have cats around and they have a lot of kittens, baby kittens. And people would just put 'em in a gunnysack with a rock and throw it in the creek and drown them. That was just something that was just a common thing that they do. So I don't recall us ever doing it, but we didn't have any cats, but we did have that dog. [Laughs] So farm life was a little different than what it is today. I don't know what happens on the farm these days. Cats, all farmers have cats. Pretty soon you have so many cats you don't know what to do with 'em.

TI: And growing up in terms of just, in terms of living in terms of, like, food, what would be your typical menu, I guess, during the week? What would you eat and things like that? Because it didn't sound like you went to the store very frequently.

TO: No. They very seldom went to the store. All I remember distinctly was wintertime, squash would keep. So in the winter, I remember we ate a whole lot of squash, and Mom would cook squash in sugar and shoyu, you know. Today I kind of enjoy it, but for a long time, I wasn't very fond of squash. Daikon, too, daikon would keep. Turnips, seems like we ate a lot of those type of things in the wintertime that would keep. Summertime, of course, we had more fresh vegetables, but I don't think, we ate very little meat. And the types of fish was, we didn't have any refrigeration, so things like salted salmon, we would buy salted salmon which would keep. And dried fish, and different kinds of dehydrate, and cook with vegetables, that type of thing.

TI: And you mentioned earlier the cutthroat trout, so you caught that to eat also?

TO: Yeah.

TI: Bring back fresh trout?

TO: Not a whole lot of it, but we did eat some trout, yeah. And I didn't particularly enjoy it, but it was something that you had to eat, yeah. And, of course, lots of tsukemono, because that was something that they could preserve, make and preserve.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.