<Begin Segment 26>

SY: So your first job out of UCLA was what?

FO: I used to work for, I used to work for Mr. Shig Yasutake, Irene Hirano's father. That's how I got to know Irene. Irene Hirano's father Shig was a hero. He was in Guadalcanal as an interrogator and interpreter, and he did so well that they pulled him out and sent him to OCS school. So I went to look him up because he was my company commander at one time. So he gave me a job, we were import/exporting with Mexico. And you know Em Kato?

SY: No.

FO: Tak Yamada and I and Shig Yasutake was the company.

SY: So a small company.

FO: Yeah. So we used to export to Mexico the agricultural equipment. Shig had arranged, hired some Mexican guys, young kids, to be salesmen down there, and they would send us the order. And then I would have to go out and look for these things, and Tak Yamada was the bookkeeper. Tak Yamada's married to Em Kato.

SY: I don't know who Tak Yamada is. Is he...

FO: He's married to Em Kato. Do you know Em Kato?

SY: No, I don't know.

FO: She's the head of the, she was the Nisei Week queen. And every year, she's the one that brings all the queens together for a big luncheon.

SY: Oh, okay. She's a big person in the community here.

FO: Yeah.

SY: That's nice. And Irene Hirano, I guess we should say, was the head of the museum for many, many, many years. For people who don't know who Irene Hirano was. And this was Irene's father that you worked with.

FO: Yeah.

SY: That's amazing. So then this company lasted how long?

FO: Well, the thing is, we had a lot of money out to the Mexican government. We sold them a lot of stuff. I used to go up and down Alameda Street to look for surplus stuff.

SY: To try to sell?

FO: Yeah. And we would sandblast the equipment to make it look like new, paint it, have it painted.

SY: Fix it up?

FO: Yeah. So it looks like new.

SY: Nice, nice.

FO: So that's what we were doing. And then we had a lot of money out to the government, the railroad, and then they devaluated the peso. So that ruined everything, because Shig had to file bankruptcy.

SY: When was that? That was in... must have been in the '60s?

FO: No, in the '50s.

SY: It was still in the '50s, wow.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.