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MN: So you were a delivery boy and on the weekends you worked at the Grand Central Market?

JK: No, that one came later.

MN: After you graduated from high school?

JK: Yeah.

MN: So tell us about this other job you had at the Grand Central Market.

JK: Yeah. Well, Grand Central was a market in which owners owned stalls like a carnival. Carnival has a hit the dummy with baseball, or baseball throwing or batting. So you had food. Well, usually a square in the whole market. First floor and a basement floor, and usually was another flight up. So it was a big market, sold everything. So people owned whatever they were selling. Mostly fruits and vegetables or [inaudible] or tortillas or Chinese chop suey. So it was a marketplace for food.

[Interruption]

MN: Okay, keep talking, tell us more about this Grand Central Market. What did you do there and how often did you work there?

JK: Okay. Well, Saturday, as you can imagine, is a busy day. So the market was busy Saturday. Usually it opened just like the regular stores did on Broadway, eight to six. A white man's job. Outside markets opened from six o'clock in the morning to almost night, midnight. So Saturdays was a busy day, so they hired high school people to work, extra help to peel the corn, chop the lettuce, cabbage, doing everything they needed to be done.

MN: Is that what you did?

JK: Yeah. Saturday you went chopping the heads of lettuce, cabbage, [inaudible], you need to cut for family size. You had to trim lettuce, what the customers, you can't worry the rotten fruits. Oh, god. They used to sell rotten... well, not to the customer, but almost the customers got very overripe tomatoes, what else? Overripe squashes. I'm telling you, it was kind of a shame to sell those because ordinary people wouldn't buy them if they knew what was, been sold. So we got away with murder because we had inspectors, food inspectors that came. The food inspectors went to the wholesale market, the same food that they inspect for the retail market. So they come to the wholesale market, the wholesale market opened very early in the morning. They come into the market, pass all those things, and so they pass two inspections without being dumped because they would, we'd have to dump some of the food that didn't pass the inspectors. So it was fun, I mean, for us, because...

MN: But you didn't take any of those foods home?

JK: Well, some.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.