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MN: Let me ask a little bit about your father before we get into your school. Your father liked to pick watercress and mushrooms?

RW: Yeah.

MN: Can you share about how he'd go about picking mushrooms and what you, what your responsibility was?

RW: Well, I didn't really have a responsibility, but he always took me and he had a little pistol, which we'll talk about later. He had a pistol in case of a snake or something that, that we could protect ourselves. And so we would go into San Bernardino, the riverbed of the Santa Ana River up there, and we'd look for the mushrooms that were on the logs, broken trees and stuff, especially during the winter, after it rains and we would go up there. And there were a lot of little streams in the area and they had a lot of watercress growing, and that he used to get for my mother who used to put it in the sukiyaki, so I really liked that. And then my dad would get the mushrooms, bring 'em home and I had heard that if you put a silver coin in the mushroom with it that the coin will turn black if it's poisonous and so I used to always stick a dime in there and never did see a black dime, so I thought, well maybe it doesn't really work. [Laughs] But then we never died, so I guess he knew what he was doing.

MN: Now at home, what kind of animals did you raise? Did you have pets or were they eating animals?

RW: The only so-called pet we had was a dog, and is the one that those people brought to camp for us. But everything else were animals to eat. We had a rabbit cage, raised white rabbits, our house property was divided by this big, deep concrete-lined drainage ditch that would, the water would come from the mountain. And so we had to walk around to the next street and go all the way around to get to our garage back there. Well on the garage, at the top, he had a little platform up there for pigeons, so he raised pigeons there so we had rabbits and chickens too. And when we went to the county fair, the Orange Show in San Bernardino, I would try to catch those little ducks and I would win a couple of ducks and bring 'em home, and we'd keep those, raise them and then my dad used to every so often kill something for us to eat. The thing that I remember most about doing that was pigeons, 'cause my dad would kill the pigeons, give it to my mom, and she would cut it up in little pieces and then I would take it and put it in this old hand grinder and grind it, bone and all with the meat, and then my mom would cook it in shoyu and sugar or whatever and then she would give it to us on rice. And you would eat it and you could taste the little, real tiny pieces of bone with that meat. It's kind of like a gritty hamburger is what it turned out to be, on the rice. I've always remembered that and it was always really good.

MN: Were these special occasions that you ate the meat?

RW: No, not necessarily. Just every so often he would just decide to kill something and so if he was gonna kill something then I'd call my brother and say, "Hey, Hank, Papa's gonna kill the rabbit." So we'd go over there and watch him. Now that I think about it it's kind of gruesome, but in those days it was just something that, I guess, had to be done.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.