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MN: Now, you worked in Wisconsin for a while. What did you do?

RN: What?

MN: You worked in Wisconsin for a while.

RN: Oh, yeah. Yes, I got to Chicago and my brother, he was a mechanic and he got a job workin' with cars and mechanics and everything. I went my own way and I got a job here, I got a job there. I worked one place a couple of days, I quit. I worked there, I quit. I worked one place, I worked about two, three hours then I said hell with this job, so I go to quit. "Hey, let me pay you." No, I says, "I didn't do nothin', I only worked here two hours." Said, "No, let me pay you," the guy says. "No, no, I don't want no money." So I didn't know what I wanted to do, so one day I went to the, to the employment office. I don't know why, but I went to the employment office, asked 'em, "Hey, what kind of jobs you got here?" And he told me, he had a whole list of jobs, and here he says, he says there's a job in a hatchery, chicken hatchery up in Wisconsin. I said, "Wisconsin, that's pretty far away." "No, no," he said. "This is on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. It's on the borderline. It's only about forty or fifty miles away." So he gave me the information on there and I took a bus up there and I was curious, and I got a job up there. It was a hatchery, chicken hatchery. And when I got there I was talkin' to a -- and there was already a Japanese guy workin' there, Japanese guy from camp, Nisei I think he was. And he was already workin' there in the hatchery there and I got to talkin' to him, and he says, yeah, he says, I live in a house in town. It's a small town called Burlington, small dinky town. Says, "I live there, but I walk to work over there, over the hill to the hatchery." So I says, "Well, I got a chance to work here," so he told me, "Come work here. Don't pay much, but you could stay in the same place where I stay." It's a family home, but they had rooms to rent.

So I worked there for about a year because the guy told me, the hatchery owner says, well, the job I got open," he says, I need somebody to work in the hatchery during the hatchery time. I got my special chickens, special Little Rock chickens, they call 'em, and he got a hatchery there, he needs somebody to work nighttimes to watch the hatchery. It wasn't a real big place, but it was a place where, for the chick sexers come and used to determine the sex, each chick hatchery. Well anyway, so I said okay, so I worked nights there, watchin' the hatchery. There's nothing to do, so I'd just work on the eggs and watch the temperature of the hatchery until the chicks come out.

So after the chicks all hatched later on I kept working there for a while and don't pay much so I worked there for not quite a year. So I said hell with it, I says, went I went back to live, went to work, I went back to Chicago. My mother was living in a, with my brother. They were living in this housekeeping house, third floor. In those days you don't think about it, but after I think about all those days I felt so sorry for my mother. She's living by herself all day long. And so what she used to do was walk down three flights of stairs. Only place you could live in those days was always the third floor. All the bottoms are always filled up. So she'd go to the store, do a little grocery shopping, little bit of housekeeping, 'cause we had no cooking utensils. All you had to do was cook with what you got, so it was very, very miserable for her, nobody to talk to until I come home from work, and my brother was there but he'd be gone. So I came back from Wisconsin and I kept, I lived with my mother. Yeah, it was very bad for her.

[Interruption]

MN: How long were you in Chicago, how many years?

RN: Three years.

MN: Now, while you were in Chicago did you have to fill out the "loyalty questionnaire"?

RN: What kind of questionnaire?

MN: The "loyalty questionnaire."

RN: War?

MN: The "loyalty."

RN: Not that, nothing.

MN: You and your brother were draft age. Were you ever drafted?

RN: Never drafted. I was, I always kept ahead. My brother never joined the army, never got a call for it. I was in Chicago, when I came back from the hatchery and I worked in Chicago at this big, it was this big factory, the foundry, or steel mill more or less, and I got a job there. I got a notice to join the army, to report to the army. I took the notice and I took it to the, to my boss, my foreman -- International Harvester, that's a very big industry -- and he just took it and, and I was working at this place, a steel mill, where they make war equipment and all that, so I never had to go. Never went for a physical even. So I worked there until I quit, 'til the war ended.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.