Densho Digital Archive - Tak Yamashita Interview (denshovh-ytak-01-0035)

<Begin Segment 35>

MN: Let me ask a little bit about how you met your wife, Molly. How did you meet her?

TY: Boy, I turned a lot of stones. I couldn't find the right worm under the stone. So I was, I hate telling my story, but anyway, I was a flirt. That's why all the girls used to say "you tell that to all the girls," which I did. [Laughs] And so how I met my girl, well, to make a long story short, I was her sister's neighbor, and her sister was married to another farmer that I got to know good. And so then in La Puente there was no activities or no dancing or no roller skating or no social activities, so we used to play, since we're there we used to go every, once a week to play poker all night long, and then her sister that's married to this friend of mine used to bring Molly over there once a week or twice a week or something, and then that's how I met her.

MN: But what year did you two marry?

TY: Let's see, what, what, I guess I met her in about '46, yeah, '46.

MN: So this is shortly after the war. You're trying to get back on your feet economically; how did you finance your wedding?

TY: You know, I was lucky that my father, my father took out a life insurance for me, ten dollars a month, which I could pay. And so I paid ten dollars a month for about, I forgot how old I was, I think he started me off when I was eighteen, sixteen or seventeen, he started this policy for me. And then he told me that, "Someday you're gonna need this money when you get married or when you want a new car or whatever," so he said keep on paying it, so then good thing I had this insurance. That's what financed my wedding. In those days weddings were high priced, but it was cheap to, compared to now. So that's how I financed it. Sorry I didn't have a nice car to take her to my honeymoon, but I borrowed my brother's car and went to the honeymoon. [Laughs]

MN: Where did you go to honeymoon at?

TY: Went up north to see her friends, went to, my highlight of the honeymoon was Pebble Beach. Went to Pebble Beach area, nice place, Santa Cruz, Yosemite, San Francisco, Tioga up north, Watsonville, Monterey, and came home and started a life, in a shack. Shack, shack, rats running around all night long. [Laughs] So that's how we got our start, Martha.