<Begin Segment 19>

DG: You had a bathhouse.

TH: Bathhouse.

DG: How many of them there?

YM: Oh, quite a few.

TH: Yeah, quite a few. Maybe seven or eight bathhouses in the Japanese community.

ET: The Publix, when was that built?

TH: In the 1920s, I think.

ET: They built it like a submarine.

YM: Same as the American Hotel.

ET: You could walk in and walk straight out, but you can't turn around.

YM: Kinkarow was built around that time. (Narr. note: located on the S.W. corner of 6th and Main Sts.)

TH: Yeah, around that time.

YM: Before '30s

TH: Before '30s, yeah.

DG: Okay. Now, the bathhouse and everybody in your hotel went there to take a bath.

TH: No. Each hotel -- all these hotels did have bath, but it's usually bathhouses where you have Issei. A lot of Issei didn't like the small tubs and things so it was the Japanese people. There was no hakujins or anything going into the bathhouse, all Japanese. And then the families, like even if they had a home, a lot of homes. There were homes without bath. There was toilets, but their bath, maybe they use the wash tub or something. (They) had to heat hot water on the stove that's why they took the kids down there for a bath.

DG: Once a week or so.

YM: None of the hotels that the Japanese had had the private bath in the rooms.

TH: No, except the N-P. N-P and Milwaukee had it.

ET: Yeah. And I noticed that when we were running the Benton, you could say, you could count on maybe one hand how many people took baths. They were all hakujin. That was the way it was so we didn't have any expensive water bill unless you had a big leak.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.