<Begin Segment 19>

MN: Now, before we go to Iowa, let's talk about your farming experience. You're a city boy, and you and your friends were city boys. Tell me, what was it like doing farm work?

BK: Well that was all a new experience for us. I mean, the three of us from our class that went out, Reggie Shikami and Seigo Yoshinaga and I, we were in the same tent, three guys in a tent. None of us had any kind of farm experience. The only incentive was that it was work and that they would pay you, and so it was not a matter of experience. It's a matter of tryin' to go out there and make some money. And they didn't tell us what kind of work we're gonna do, except farm work, so as we were assigned to go out and work we found out what the job was and we applied ourselves. So it's a whole new experience for all of us. Some people worked on a farm. Some people worked in the plants, like there was one experience where we worked for a company that canned peas, and they put them in cans and then cooked them and brought them out, and you had to take it out of the, I think a big metal basket that they had taken in and cooked them, and it had to come out of the cooker and had to take them out and then stack them. And stackin' em', you had to have gloves because it was still hot. But we did that kind of job. There were others that worked at making ketchup. The tomatoes would come down the row and you would have to take the ones that were not so good or not tomatoes or leaves and try to clear the belt of irregulars and the ones that wouldn't be applicable to the kitchen. And you learn on the job what was required. We had to clean the stalls of animals' refuse, and we had to mow the hay. We had to work in lining up the rows of hay. You have to get the hay that's cut and line it up in rows so that the machine can come down and pick up the hay and bale it. And then after it's baled, then you have to take the baled hay and put them on trucks and then put them in the barn. So we learned how to do each phase as they taught us, and I tell you, we came out very physically strong after the work we did on the farm. It was hard work. (...) For tomato season, what you have to do is, as the tomato plants grow, you have to kinda prune them to get the ones that aren't doing so well and take them off the vine because they take the same nourishment that the other ones are provided, and you need the nourishments for the good ones, so they become good solid tomatoes. So the preliminary, I guess, pickings are more or less ferret out or clean out the bad ones, and so we did that and from there on it's supposed to be good pickings. Well, you have bad luck and the frost came in. It froze all the tomatoes. Everything is dead. You learn that farming is not all that easy to do. The farmers that make money, they're lucky. We learned everything about the problems of the farmers. They hired us to do the work and we did whatever we had to do.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.