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TI: But then, eventually, your father married your mother, Japanese.

FS: Yeah, because my folks, grandfather, grandmother, were after my dad. "You got to get married. You're thirty years old, what are you doing?" you know. "So we got a wife for you, we got a bride for you, come on back and marry her," before 1925. So I think they married about 1922, '23, somewhere around there.

TI: So your father went back to Hiroshima...

FS: To get the wife.

TI: ...they got married, and then they came back.

FS: Yeah.

TI: Given your, what was your mother like? I mean, how would she...

FS: Oh, she was big; she was tall, robust. Not fat, but a farmgirl, you know what I mean? [Laughs] Yeah, she was a hustler. She's the one that I think made, became prominent, you know, being a restaurant owner, things like that. My mom was the one that pushed it. My dad didn't care. If he had one restaurant and he was making ends meet, then that was fine. But Mother, my mother was a pusher, wanted one restaurant... so in Chicago, this is what got us through according to my business, my dad's business partner. They had a three-restaurant chain, one, two, three restaurants in Chicago. This is before I was born, you know, before '25.

TI: And what kind of restaurants would they have?

FS: American food. Funny, huh? [Laughs] He was a French cook.

TI: French cook, Japanese...

FS: No.

TI: No, but he was Japanese, and he was a French cook, and he had American restaurants.

FS: Went to Chicago, and making beef stew.

TI: And who was his clientele? With these three restaurants, what kind of customers?

FS: I would say in south State Street, so it was under Al Capone's area. A lot of minority, mostly all whites. You could say minority whites: Italian, Jewish, Polish, German, you know what I mean.

TI: So kind of working-class people?

FS: Working-class white people. There was no black people in Chicago in those days. They came after World War II and during World War II, from the South as laborers in the factories, and they stayed. So that's how the black people grew. But when I was born, there was no black people, very few. And only one there was, my dad says was railroad porters, cook, waiter, on the railroad cars, dining cars.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.