Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Grace Sugita Hawley Interview
Narrator: Grace Sugita Hawley
Interviewer: Megan Asaka
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: June 3, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-hgrace-01-0017

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MA: And then you were in St. Paul for, you said, nine months? And then your father got word that he could, the family could return back to Hawaii. So you then went, you all returned to Honolulu. And what happened? I mean, was your house still there, were your possessions all there?

GH: Uh-huh. Everything was there... everything was aged. [Laughs] It was there, but run-down more, because for three years, I guess, my uncle and his family lived there, and it wasn't their house. Of course, everything gets older in three years. So we were able to just move back into our house, he went back to his house. And fortunately for us, we had a lot of people, we talked to some other people who were from Jerome, they had no homes to go to. And they had to go and stay in a church, like hostels, until they could get settled. And there were a lot of people who really, really had nothing, no jobs, nothing. It's hard for them. So for us, it was, we were way better off, and my dad just went back to the bakery. Except that the bakery went downhill, and he was shocked when he saw the conditions and the changes. Because it was very successful when he left. And he knew it was bad. He had a lot of correspondents going back and forth. When I went through his... I went, I ordered his file from the archives, from Washington, D.C., and it was a pretty thick file. Because he had a lot of hearing, also trying to get a pass to go out, he had that, and he also tried to get money sent to him from here, through the bakery, bakery funds. Because he said we need money to live on. We can't just let the camp, depend on what the camp... 'cause you have no money. They give you, they give you a salary of nineteen dollars a month, that's the highest-paying job, which would be block managers, doctors, the professionals. And then, ordinary job would be sixteen dollars a month. And he said, "What can you buy with that?" even in those days, you know. So he wanted them to send him money. So he would go to the camp director and they would write to my uncle and it goes back and forth. And the uncle would talk to the attorney, and I saw all the correspondence. I didn't know, I had no clue about those things until I read all that. And so finally, I think they were able to send him some money. Because I know my mother used to buy things from catalog. I don't know where she had the money to do it otherwise, you know. They must have had some income. But anyway, when we came back to Hawaii, he found out how bad it was. Oh, and before that, before that, the government was gonna auction off the bakery.

MA: This was during the war?

GH: Yeah. I think right as the war ended. War ended or before the war was almost gonna end. I'm not too sure about the timing. They were gonna auction off the bakery because they still had control of certain funds. And my uncles, they wrote to my father and he said, "We can't let it go like that." My grandfather would die if he finds out we let it go. "So we have to buy it back," he said. And so they all had to pitch in, they paid sixty-five thousand to buy the bakery back. Imagine, they had to buy their own bakery back, either that, or lose it. And so they bought it back, but it was too bad because from there on, it was still downhill. And so in the end, after we went back and my father stayed a few years working, trying to build it up, he gave up and he sold out to his brothers. His brother still wanted to run it, so he sold it to them. And that's why he wanted to go to Chicago where my brother was going to school and Bert was going to school. 'Cause my sister and my brother were married that year, and two years later, I think they decided to go to Chicago to go to school. So my dad said, "Why don't we all go?" So we all went.

MA: So, but before that, you were in high school, right, when you came back to Hawaii?

GH: Uh-huh.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.