<Begin Segment 9>

TI: So I want to go back just to kind of daily life growing up. I mean, in terms of things like a bathroom, did you have indoor plumbing or was it an outhouse? Can you describe...

HU: Oh, yeah. In the beginning, when I was small, it was dirt floor, I remember, and then it had this, they had two by fours and they had flats, so actually you wouldn't touch the floor, but later on we rebuilt it and then we had cement on the bottom. Then, of course, it was a shack, no inside covering. The plumbing was from the pipe. We had a five hundred gallon tank where we stored the water, and it was at a higher level and you had a piping down to where we lived, (...) that's where we got the water. And then -- no, come to think of it, we had this piping down to the yard and into the kitchen, but from, to the bathroom it was just a short distance from the pipe faucet, so we had this water hose going into the tub to fill that up, and then they, there's, it's made out of redwood, the bottom is like galvanized steel, and then of course it gets hot, so they used to have this, gesuita they called it. It's, it's a bunch of slats, made out of slat, and it would float on the top, so you would keep the heat and then when you go in you step on it, it sinks down and then it keeps your feet away from the hot metal there. And then of course, Japanese style where you wash yourself and you go in, everybody, all of us go into the same hot water there. And then, of course it was heated by these cuttings, brushes, and then when it's heated up we would take it out and pour water on the, make charcoal out of it, and that charcoal, we used to use it to heat the room in the wintertime. I remember we used to have a bucket and this washtub, sort of discarded washtub. We would put dirt and ashes on there and we would put that charcoal and then heat up the room.

TI: Would you have to worry about things like, so how would it vent? I mean, what about carbon monoxide poisoning or something like that?

HU: Right. That, yeah, that's a good point. We had enough air coming in because it wasn't that sealed, house wasn't that sealed, so we didn't have to worry about it. Of course, in a room like this you're dead.

TI: So there was enough, I guess, holes in the wall and things like that in ceiling.

HU: Right.

TI: Okay. There was a story you mentioned to me over the phone about toilet paper, what you used for toilet paper back in those days.

HU: Oh, yeah, yeah.

TI: Tell me about that. Where would you get your toilet paper?

HU: We, everything, we were green people. We recycled everything, newspaper, recycled for irrigation. When you irrigate the land, you irrigate the water from the top going down and you, you have this, like a step, you have sort of a dam, you have a ditch, you have a dam, and we used to use newspaper to cover that so you brought your own. So that's one way we used the newspaper and newspaper, we used it for toilet paper. Also magazine, we used to have Japanese magazines, books and they're, they're usually on newsprint type of paper, so it made good toilet paper. And I remember it was 1939, we had a neighbor named Art Shiyohama, he was a lot older than my brother, but he used to come around and he used to like to read the comic books and one day he brought me May issue of the Detective magazine, and there was one story that really fascinated me. It was about a boy about my age, he was about my age and he went to a theater with his parents and when they came out they got mugged, his parents were killed and later he became a crusader. They called him Batman. So that was the first issue of the Batman magazine and about twenty, twenty-five years ago it was going for about hundred twenty-five, well hundred, hundred twenty-five thousand in (an) auction, and I remember going to Quartsite, (Arizona) -- that's a, that used to be a real huge mega, mega swap meet. Right now they don't have it anymore. And there was this comic book dealer and I told him about the, my comic book. I told him, "Hey, I have this 1939 issue of the Detective magazine," and then I told him what I did with it and I was hoping that he'll give me some sympathy. I was expecting sympathy, but instead of sympathy he laughed and laughed, (he then) called me a "hundred thousand dollar asshole" and --

TI: So Hank, you have to explain this. This is the very first edition of Batman --

HU: Yeah.

TI: -- which as a collector's item is incredibly valuable and rare. So you had this back in 1939. What happened to this?

HU: That, I used it as toilet paper. Yeah, and just a few months ago I saw it on the television it went for about one point something, over one million dollars. And so it went to wipe my ass.

TI: Yeah, that's, that's, I'm glad we documented that. [Laughs] That, that would've been a family heirloom if you had kept it.

HU: [Laughs] Right. I wouldn't be here.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.