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TI: Let's... I asked earlier, or mentioned earlier that there must've been times that you needed to help at the store. Can you talk about sort of your role at the store, what you had to do?

TH: Yeah, well, it was wherever I could help, so it was when I was quite small. Well, my dad would leave the house, I'd guess, around four in the morning, and go down to the market to pick up, I guess, fresh vegetables and fruits and whatever. And he would probably return maybe six, maybe seven o'clock in the morning, and those days, stores would open up at, say, six in the morning to provide service to people going to work, which meant that the people then would be at work at eight o'clock in the morning. Well, so it meant that we had to open up the store early so these people, if they're short on something, they can come to the store and buy it. So the store was set up that it had very heavy doors, not really doors, but maybe panels that would lock together to form the outside walls, and when the business is open the panels are then put aside (...) vegetable counters (...) would be pushed partway out onto the sidewalk. Well, I remember getting up early with my mother and pushing, help push (open) one of the panels back (about a foot or more) so that the people could come into the store, buy what they want, and those panels were very heavy and sort of rickety, so we were very careful in doing that. And then when my dad got back then (...) he'd push the panels open and push the store open, got the store completely open. I remember doing that. That was my earliest thoughts of helping my dad out, and I don't know how old I was. Maybe seven years old or something, just to be with my mother, I guess. Yeah, that would be right because he opened the store in '32, and so that would be right and I would be with my mother as, so that she wouldn't be doing it all by herself. And plus, I guess now, thinking about it, I might have been the English interpreter. [Laughs] She didn't understand too much of the English part.

But later on, in those days rice came in a hundred pound sacks, and so I guess the maturation was if you can throw the hundred pound sack of rice on your shoulder and take it out of store and put it into truck or car or whatever, and so as I grew older and my dad had hired a couple of people, (...) by the time that, I guess sixteen was when one could get a license, driver's license, so by the time I was sixteen I would make some of the deliveries. And the delivery would actually, would probably have a hundred pound sack of rice, and I remember he says, "Okay, you deliver to Mrs. So-and-So." Alright, fine. So I get there and I look up, and that's where she lives, three flights up. The hundred pound sack of rice on my back and sixteen years old, struggled my way up there. She said, "Don't put it down."And she had a rice bin, which then we opened it up, put the rice in the rice bin. But doing that kind of work, I attributed the fact that, later on, thinking, that really strengthened my body, so (it helped) a lot (for) things that happened to me later on, I didn't think about it at the time. Thinking now about it, I think that turned out to be a real plus for me. (...) Then also got to the point where (...) I would be receiving goods and (...) check the inventory and so forth and make sure that when the meats came in that the poundage was correct, throw it on the scale and they would charge us for, say, twenty-five pounds of meat. Look at it and says no, that's only twenty-two and a half pounds, and the delivery guy didn't like that. (...) Those are some of the things I remember.

TI: So you're kind of doing a lot of different things, delivering, checking, all those different things.

TH: Yeah. Cutting meat and so forth.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.