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MN: Now, talking about your family, you mentioned that there were nine children, your parents had nine children. Where are you in the sibling hierarchy?

RW: At the bottom, the last. And I think when I came then they got tired of me, tired of kids, so they stopped with me. But I'm the youngest of the nine.

MN: Were you delivered in a hospital or by a sanbasan?

RW: Well, actually I was delivered at home, but it was with this hakujin lady who helped her, or helped with it. And it's ironic that I was going to high school there and one of my good friends, a Caucasian asked me if I had a sister named Mary, and I said yeah, and he said, "I think my mom and dad know your mom and dad. Wasn't her name Mary and wasn't she named for Merry Christmas?" And I said I don't know how she was named. He said, "Yeah, my mother helped and father helped your father name her Mary from Merry Christmas," although her name is spelled M-A-R-Y. So that was kind of interesting 'cause all of a sudden I run into him and these are his parents from way back, I forgot what year she was born, but 1917 or somewhere around there, so that was a long time ago.

MN: That's really interesting that the hakujin ladies would come and, I guess, be midwives for the Japanese. This is the first I've heard of that. Mostly it's been like Japanese sanbasans helping the Japanese mothers.

RW: Well, from what I understand, especially from my sister 'cause most of my information comes from my sister because she was around at that time as a little girl, but my mother apparently was working for different families and our family and all the Japanese in Redlands were taken in by the University of Redlands professors' wives. And the University of Redlands, of course, is a Baptist school, so our family and all the Japanese belonged to the Baptist church, and they even formed what they called a Cosmopolitan Club which had all of the Japanese in Redlands plus a few Mexican people and just any race of people. And they used to have a bible class on Wednesday and then they had big parties at Mrs. Grace Nichols's house, who was the wife of a professor, and they would have a big Christmas party, Valentine's party, Halloween parties, dinner at their place and all the Japanese would come. And Christmas was a big production, costumes and scenes of the shepherds, and they had a big house so they had, like a curtain, stage and, not a true stage, but another room with a curtain, so the parents would sit there and really enjoy it too. And most of the Japanese parents didn't speak English, but they really got along well with those people. In fact, this Mrs. Nichols and her husband, they actually came to Poston, Arizona, to visit us, which was unique. They brought our dog with them.

MN: Now, you're talking about the Japanese Americans in Redlands. Were there other minorities in Redlands, like blacks and Latinos?

RW: Well, the blacks in those days were far and few, but there were a lot of Mexicans because they were sort of like migrant harvesters. The father would go up to Fresno, up northern and central California to do harvesting and to would pick the oranges and things like that, so it was a very heavy influx of Mexican people. Our town was pretty well segregated, so our school was made up of where all of our families went, the nine of us, it was called Lincoln Grammar School, and when I was there my class was probably eighty to ninety percent Mexican kids 'cause our whole area was Mexican. The other part of town, certain part of town was, was a little higher class, up in the hills, and then another side of town was not necessarily as heavy as ours with Mexicans, but it had maybe fifty-fifty. And so when I got to know them all, I saw the difference, in high school I could see the difference in who came from Lincoln, who came from this Lugonia School which was maybe fifty percent, and who came from Kingsbury, which was doctors' kids and stuff like that. But they were still all good friends. We all were good friends. There was no class difference, it's just that we lived in different parts of the town.

MN: So I guess once you got into high school all the grammar school kids went to one high school? Is that what I'm...

RW: At that time, yeah. There's three now, but there was one then.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.