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TI: In 1915 your brother was born, so let's talk about your siblings. So your, is it your brother Ben was the first one?

HU: Yeah, Ben was the first, and then three years later there was Sam and two years later there was Miharu and then I think two years after that was Yoshimi, my sister, and five years later was myself.

TI: Good. So Ben, Sam, Miharu, Yoshimi, and then Hank. And, and tell me, tell me a little bit about the family home when you were growing up. What was that like?

HU: Physical or cultural?

TI: Yeah, let's start physical and then we'll talk about...

HU: Okay, physical, let me see, it wasn't much of a home. I remember my mother saying that Ben was born in a barn next to a couple of horses, so they really started from scratch. So as, as far as I could remember, we had a main parlor which was decent. It had the, it had inside walls covered with wood, but the rest of the bedrooms and kitchen and things, it was a frame, a shell and it didn't have the inside walls, so these (two) by fours, you could see all these (two) by fours and of course we used to use those four by fours to put things on.

TI: So essentially no insulation?

HU: No insulation, yeah. And so I remember my bedroom, we used to cover, plaster newspapers to keep the wind out, so it was crude, like a pioneer home. When I think of it right now I like to call it, say rustic. So, so we had, we had this parlor which was halfway decent and then we had the dining room, kitchen, couple bedrooms and they were all bare inside, and then we had this, a little sort of a shack where they used to house the workers. During the harvest season, they used to hire Filipinos, and I guess Mexicans weren't around at the time, so the Filipinos were the workers and they used to sleep in this house during the harvesting season. And I used to sleep in there because I was, when I was about twelve years old, eleven, twelve, I wanted to get away from the family, so I used to sleep in there.

TI: And did you stay, did you sleep in there when the migrant workers also slept --

HU: No, then by that time we had enough (working members) in our family so that we didn't have to hire anybody.

TI: So even at a young age you, you liked to be independent?

HU: Yes, so it was good. It's cool. [Laughs]

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.