Densho Digital Archive - Takashi Hori - Yoshito Mizuta - Elmer Tazuma Interview (denshovh-htakashi

<Begin Segment 13>

DG: Okay. Now, let's talk a little bit about the running of the hotels and who you hired.

YM: Well, we didn't hire anybody, just the family.

ET: Yeah, that was the beautiful part of it. Now, see like the Eclipse, we became like one big family. The people living there, they never ask except if it's really necessary. Otherwise, they paid the rent, we give them sheet once a week, and they took care of their room unless they are sick, then we go and help them out. But it was harmonious. It's not like a hotel where transients are going through all the time. It was like one big family. And in 1960 around that period, I think social security -- see, we were catering to the bottom rung of the population and social security was about 65 dollar, if I remember right, and they couldn't afford any place that was out of their reach. So we came in handy for them and that's one reason why we had a full house most of the time. The rent was cheap. Like in my case it was $8 a month, the highest was $20 because it had the water in the room, and we gave them gas, a change of -- we cleaned their room sometime.

DG: What about painting the room?

ET: Yeah, we painted the room.

TH: Yeah, we kept the room up.

DG: Salty, you were going to say something.

YM: Well, we had a lot of Filipinos and they all went to Alaska canneries in the summertime, but during the winter there is no work for them so they charged up all the rooms, and they paid when they came back from Alaska, quite a few. We had quite a few of them. (Narr. note: But in 1941, we lost on all the IOU's we had because Japan attacked the Philippines and the Filipinos went to California instead of returning to the hotel. Soon after, Pearl Harbor was attacked and we were evacuated.)

ET: They were young too, weren't they? Real young.

YM: We had housekeeping rooms so we used to give them sheets once a week and housekeeping was, we give them pots and pans, whatever we had. They used those things to cook.

DG: Did you serve meals to anybody?

YM: No.

ET: Unless they get sick and they can't go out, we'd bring them some soup. We were like a nursing home sometimes.

YM: Was there any welfare in those days?

TH: Sure there was. Welfare went into existence in the '30s.

ET: When they get sick we take them to the hospital in our car. We never called the ambulance unless they had to be carried out feet first.

DG: What did you do when they died?

ET: Well, the coroner takes care of them and a lot of them didn't have any relatives so we did, we went to the funeral, that is I did. You get to be like one big family. I mean, you get attached to them. In my case the tenants took care of my kids. They take them downtown to watch the train come in when they were small so we had it good both ways.