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TI: Okay, so I'm going to bring you back a little bit. And you talked about school, it was like a two-room schoolhouse? Can you describe a little bit in terms of who the other students were?

WY: Oh, they were mostly Japanese because we were farmers in that area. But, see, I did go to a school, several schools, that were white, you know. Because, and the district called Number 8, that I'll remember. And then by the time I was in fourth grade, I was in this Trifolium District, which there were just two rooms. One to third and fourth to eighth like that.

TI: Well, I mean, where you grew up was so close to the border, the Mexican border. Were there very many Mexicans who were farm workers also in this area?

WY: Yeah. They weren't farmers, they were laborers.

TI: Okay, laborers. But then weren't they also in the school?

WY: There weren't very many. I think there was one black family called the Meltons. And the boy was the same age as I, so he was in fourth to sixth grade. Then after, after sixth grade, we went to Westmorland school, which was a town school. And up to the point where we were growing up, we, there were Japanese and blacks, and a few poor whites. And they went to school to the eighth grade, but by the time we were in sixth grade, they started cutting us off and sending us to town school. But at that point, I thought... oh, I guess it was one black family called the Meltons, can't remember what the white family's name was. We called them "poor whites," 'cause they used to call us "Japs."

TI: But it was mostly Japanese families.

WY: Yeah. And they were, like, they were mostly Okinawans, they were a very close-knit group. They went to picnics and they went to church and all that together. But we went to Buddhist church, and we were kind of loners. There weren't enough Shizuoka-kens to get out a picnic with.

TI: Yeah, before this interview, I just checked kind of what the weather was like in the Imperial Valley. And we're, right now, this is July, and I just looked at the temperatures, and it would normally be every day in the hundreds.

WY: Yeah, it was hot.

TI: It would be almost all summer, the high temperatures would be sometimes over a hundred ten degrees, and there was like no rain for weeks and weeks and weeks. I mean, what was it like growing up in that kind of environment?

WY: It was hot in summer and it was cold in winter, but you don't know any better. And then you're all involved with yourself when you're a kid, you know. And everybody has the same problems, it was during the Depression, everybody wore tattered clothes and put cardboard in their shoes and things like that. My mother always said, "There's no excuse for not having clean clothes," she says. But I remember it was during the Depression, nobody cared, because we were so involved with ourselves. Everybody was in the same boat.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.