<Begin Segment 3>

MN: I'm gonna ask you a little bit about your farm. How big was your farm in Missoula?

RN: I would say twenty-five acres.

MN: What did you grow on the farm?

RN: All vegetables. All vegetables.

MN: Is it truck farming vegetables? Like lettuce?

RN: Lettuce, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, cauliflower, and peppers, I think. I remember cucumbers he had.

MN: How did you plow the fields? Did you have tractors at the time?

RN: No, we had horses and we pulled the horses behind, well, there was a, there was primitive, they called 'em, they used to call 'em harrows, H-A-R-R-O-W, that would break up the soil with the team of horses.

MN: Did your older brothers and sisters have to help on the farm?

RN: Off and on, yes.

MN: Did you also have seasonal workers?

RN: Just one, one or two.

MN: Were they Japanese?

RN: One was Japanese, one was white.

MN: How old were you when you started to help your father during the summer selling vegetables?

RN: I was too young. I was too young. I didn't work in the fields; I was too young.

MN: But you started to ride with your father into town, is that right?

RN: Right.

MN: During the summers.

RN: Uh-huh.

MN: How old were you?

RN: Oh, five or six.

MN: Tell, share with us how you would do this, how the process, after your brothers and sisters picked the vegetables, then what did you and your father do?

RN: What did I do? After the vegetables were processed, washed and everything, next morning he would put 'em on his truck and I would go with him. I'd sit in the front seat with him and we would ride into town, which is only about one or two, not even, not even two miles. It's a small town. And he would go along the streets, house to house, and park the car like they do now and peddle it, and they would stop the car on the street. They would come and pick the vegetables off the truck and he would sell it. One day he would go on one side of this town, next day he'll go to another side. He had three routes, this side, this side, this side.

MN: How much did you sell the vegetables for?

RN: Lettuce, I think, if I remember correctly, was one penny. And I don't know about the other vegetables. They must've been two pennies or maybe three, I don't know, but... so we would finish about noon. Then we would drive back to the farm, which is maybe one or, maybe two miles, mile and a half. It was real close.

MN: How short was the Montana growing season?

RN: What?

MN: How short was the Montana growing season?

RN: Say that over again.

MN: How many months can you grow in Montana?

RN: How many what?

MN: Months. Months.

RN: How many months...

MN: Was the growing season in Montana?

RN: Maybe five months, not even five months. One crop a year, that's it.

MN: When it began to snow what did you do for fun?

RN: [Laughs] Just go outside and play in the snow. That's all we had -- we had a sled, and it's a country road, no paved roads, so my father, he bought us a sled and we all used that one sled. And that's all we did. No toys.

MN: How cold does it get in Montana?

RN: Ten below zero, maybe twenty below zero when the, what they call, they had blizzards those days. You can't go outside for four or five, six days. You can't go outside.

MN: How did your mother keep you, the children, warm during those cold nights?

RN: Well, we all slept one or two beds. We all slept together. We didn't have separate rooms or separate beds. The kids would all sleep together, two or three, and every night we used to have a clay jug, it was an old-fashioned clay jug that they put everything in there, water, whiskey, anything. You would hot, boiling hot water into that thing and put it at the foot of the bed. She would wrap it in a towel or blanket and put it in the bed at the foot of our, where our feet is, and that would keep us warm during the night when you sleep. 'Course we had what they call Japanese futons, so that's what we kept, how we kept warm.

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