<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So, Richard, I want to... we're going to start the second part of the interview. Now I want to go back to some of the mischief that you got into. At the store, you would sometimes steal some things, you talked about the bullets for instance and maybe some other minor things. And then another kind of mischief that you got into was when you stole cars. And I wanted to ask you in terms of the difference in terms of, so one was more outside and one was more internal to the camps. And did you see a distinction between the two?

RH: Yes, in that in the camp, okay, we're already in jail. So what the heck, we're just doing stuff inside the camp and we're getting back to the government for putting us here. I didn't really care about that. After a while, stealing the bullets and stuff like that, I kind of felt bad. I went back to the town -- well, this is about fifty years later -- and I kind of went through the town and looking for the places, it's changed so much that I couldn't find the hardware store anymore where I stole the bullets. I would've donated some money there and say, "Hey, I did this as a kid long time ago, please accept this money," something like that. And even as a child in Modesto I stole some stuff and I went back, place is gone, nothing there.

TI: That's interesting to me that you would want to return to, say the town and pay for those bullets. But then you feel no compunction to do that in terms of the government and what happened in camps.

RH: I pay taxes like everybody else, right? They're stealing money from me, that's the way I see it anyway.

TI: Now when this was going on, before your dad came back, did your mother ever talk to you? Did she ever try to encourage you to be better?

RH: Well, I don't know if she knew. I really don't know if she knew. If she did she never told me about it.

TI: Okay, so where we kind of left the story was your father had kind of bailed you out of your service so you could help him make crates because essentially camp administration told your father, "It's time for your family to leave camp," because you and your brother were getting into so much trouble. So let's pick up the story there. So how do you decide where to go?

RH: Well, when they told us that we have to go, okay. But where are we going? I figured that we were going to go back to Modesto but my dad says he's gotten letters from my uncle in Chicago. And he says that, "This is a good place for business so you should look into it." So on the way home to Modesto, we decided... my dad decided to go to Chicago and go from there. And so he came to Chicago and then we stayed here about a month and we were just taking the trains because we had nothing to do, and we'd take it all the way downtown and that was the end of the line and then come back to the end of the line. And we'd get off and that was about two hours later, so it was something to do and then we'd take a walk out to the lake. And then one day he says, "I bought a business so we're going to move to the north side." And we moved up there and took care of the business and it snowballed from there.

TI: But tell me about Modesto and what happened to the business there. So you had boarded up everything and what happened to that?

RH: Well, he went back there, my dad went back by himself, I think it was in '46, and he wanted to bring back some of the machinery and mainly it was a boiler. And so he crated that and brought that back and the business itself, the machinery, I don't know what he did with that, probably junked all the metal things that were there. And he came back and he talked to a lawyer about selling the business and the property back there and settling with the government. So he got the money, whatever it was, I had nothing to do with that. I don't remember anything. And I remember though there was something like seven or eight thousand dollars involved, but anyway we brought the boiler back here, we bought a piece of property and we were installing the boiler.

TI: And before we continue there I just wanted to ask, what was the condition of the Modesto property after it being boarded up and left alone with all the equipment? What happened in terms of the condition of things?

RH: You know, I saw some photos of that and that's all I saw and he says that it was pretty good shape but you can see where the people had ransacked the building, did whatever they wanted to do.

TI: So there's some vandalism there?

RH: Oh, yeah.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.