<Begin Segment 6>

TI: Okay, so let's pick up back your story. Where you left it was your, your uncle sold the store, the cafe and then went to Terminal Island.

MT: Yes.

TI: So let's pick up the story, so how did your father get there?

MT: You have to understand, one other point about Terminal Island is that the canneries owned these cannery homes. Most of 'em were duplexes, two family lived there. You might have six, seven kids and still be in the duplex because you were just a crew member. If you owned a boat you might have a whole house like my uncle did. There were, he just had a daughter and he had a whole house, a barrack like house. It's really, unpainted wood and stuff, and there were very, kind of makeshift homes. They didn't, you didn't have regular posts on the, like you would have, in a regular home you would framework then you would put shingles on it and things like that. They didn't do that. Sidings, they didn't, it was a wood post, I would say it's four by four on the end, and then had a slit cut in there in top and bottom and they would slide pieces about three or four inch tongue in groove floor boards into it until it gets to next post, so what you had was essentially a very simple, rudimentary, with a very small door so that, like my cousin, when they had to put their piano in there, had to take all the walls apart, the door apart, walls apart, move the piano in, then put it back together again. That's how they, that's how they made those things. And so, but it was livable. It wasn't, had a floor. It was basically, and they had ceilings and so they would stuff things up in the ceilings, but they had two families in each one of those. And my, my uncle, of course he owned the boat and he did, he was a very successful fisherman, so he had a whole house and they even gave him, his wife a plot of land where his house could go to, for her garden. She grew flowers there. My uncle built a, in front of his house, my father built a pond and a bridge, so you had to cross the bridge to get to his house, small pond.

TI: So within Terminal Island there was a hierarchy? If you were a good fisherman, owned a boat, then you were kind of one of the top people in the community.

MT: Yeah, I believe, well, the successful, wealthier -- they weren't that wealthy, but wealthier fishermen were treated a little differently and they're respected because they were the owners. I think one family had a stucco house. There was a stucco house there and they were able to rent that. Now, they were owned, most of the houses were owned by each cannery, so long as you took your fish to that cannery they would give you a house. Now, after my uncle died in 1940 they had to move 'cause they didn't, afterwards they changed to a different cannery, so my cousin had to move and the mother had to move, but they still got a whole house.

TI: So it reminds me almost of a plantation mentality. I mean, the canneries owned everything. As long as you played by their rules then you were fine.

MT: Yeah. Exactly right.

TI: But they were making a lot of money off of all this.

MT: They were, yeah, but when they financed the boats they kept fifty-one percent of the ownership of the boats and, and then the fishermen, when they go fishing, they would give shares of the fish. So if you were a low crewmember or a crewmember you would get so much and then the captain of the boat gets so much and the owner'd get more. That's the way the shares went.

TI: And who were the owners of the canneries?

MT: They were very prominent people, that's all I knew them as. Some of 'em had started building large boats of their own and they built tuna clippers, which means as the fishes... there were a lot of sardines in that area and that was the main staple, and mackerel would come in and, and then in certain parts of season tuna would come in, albacore tuna, those, so they would do that and the Japanese brought the, the bamboo pole with a barbless hook, feather with a barbless hook fishing to the United States, and so they could, if the fish is large they could put three guys on three poles attached to one, one fly and catch. And so that's what they brought and they...

TI: But the owners, you say, are prominent people, so these were, were white individuals or they're some Japanese who owned...

MT: These were all Japanese people.

TI: They're all Japanese?

MT: The whole Terminal Island was Japanese except for, I believe, two families. One, one was just an elderly couple. Another was, had kids and they were white Russians. The kids were born here, but their background was white Russian, parents were from Russia. You know what white Russian is?

TI: Right, right.

MT: I guess it's Belarus now. They, but the kids spoke this pidgin, they spoke this Japanese 'cause they went to school with each other and played with each other.

TI: But going back to the, the ownership of these canneries, that would take a lot of money, capital to do that. Where --

MT: Yeah, there was one cannery that was owned by Japanese, rest were all owned by other people, whites. I think Chicken of the Sea, you know that canned food, that was Van De Kamps, that was started in Terminal Island.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.