<Begin Segment 26>

SY: So when, so when, where did you live when you came back to California?

YM: Well, first we lived on First Street. [Laughs]

SY: In Little Tokyo?

YM: Yeah, in Little Tokyo, 'cause his father -- and he had remarried -- and his wife, so they had two rooms so they gave us one room. It was, it was right on East First in the middle of, between San Pedro and Central.

SY: Convenient.

YM: So we lived there for a little while and then I was expecting my first child, so we moved out to a little place near south Pasadena and we lived there for a while. Then we moved back to Uptown for, my mother found a house there.

SY: I see.

YM: [Laughs] Yeah, so she said there's this little house so we moved to Uptown for a while, right off of Olympic Boulevard.

SY: And you had your, you had one son?

YM: By then I had two children.

SY: Oh, you had two children.

YM: Yeah, and then Randy was born there when I lived there, and then so we moved to another house.

SY: So all together how many children?

YM: I have three children.

SY: And can you tell me a little bit, the first one was born in...

YM: Yes, first one was born when we were living up in south, near Pasadena, and in those days they still had the Japanese hospital, so he was born there. And that was 1949 and that was the one winter that it snowed in California. I have a picture of, when it was, this was right before he was born. It was in January of '49, we had snow, and that's when I had my first child. [Laughs] And then Judy came along in -- the first one is Rick -- and Judy came along in 1951, still up in the Hills there, and then we moved down to Olympic Boulevard in Uptown, then Randy was born in 1954. And then we moved to an area near Fairfax in Washington and we lived there about eight years, and then we moved to our present house.

SY: I see. And all this time when you were having the children Rick was working in the printing business?

YM: Yes.

SY: And you were doing what?

YM: Well, I used to do some home work if there was, 'cause there was a group of people that if they get some home work they'll let you know that it's available or something, so they, the first thing I did where, was making graduation gowns for, this was for, Bullocks Wilshire had a contract with Marymount and the one in Pasadena. Anyway, there're two girls schools, they had a contract for their graduation gowns, so I don't know, somebody that was working on it, so they shared it with me or something, so I had five gowns to make. They were long graduation gowns.

SY: So you really kept kind of in this, doing the tailoring and seamstress work.

YM: Yeah. That's right. Just for a little spending money. So I did that, then later on there was a Cahill company that made wedding gowns, and I don't know if you remember, in the old days they had all these buttons down your back and buttons up and down your sleeve, and they needed loops like this and so that's what I made for quite a while, making, they'd send me the satin and I'd make the loops so they could just sew it up. So I did that for a while. And then when we moved to Olympic there was a Jewish neighbor next door, and he was from the old country and he wanted to start a business, so he bought this bow tie company, and so since we were neighbors, we didn't know each other, but he came up to me, wanted to know if I'd be interested in making bow ties. So he gave me some samples and I... then he said, oh yeah, that's fine. So then I started to work for him, made the bow tie with the little clips on 'em, that kind. And I worked for him for quite a few years, and then when I moved I had to quit, and I thought, well, I'll quit for a while. Then one day he and his partner comes over to my house where I'd moved with a sewing machine, with a power machine, and he says, "We're gonna make cummerbunds now." You know the ones that you, it goes with the...

SY: Tuxedo.

YM: Yeah, tuxedo. So I made cummerbunds for a while. And even when I moved to the house I'm in now, I made cummerbunds for quite a few years.

SY: For this company, wow.

YM: Yeah, and then when Randy was in junior high school, then I quit home work and went out to work.

SY: Once he was in school.

YM: Yeah, once he was in school.

SY: And what did you end up doing?

YM: Well, I ended up working for the old Thrifty Drugstore company, and they happened to be on Rodeo and La Brea, which makes it very convenient for me to get to 'cause I'm a bus rider, and so I only had to take one bus to La Brea. And so I worked for them, and towards the end we moved to Wilshire Boulevard right next to the Ambassador Hotel, I worked for Thrifty for twenty-three years.

SY: Wow. Just doing clerical kinds of work?

YM: Yes, clerical work and accounting, accounting department.

SY: I see. Wow. That's a long time. I didn't realize you worked for Thrifty for that long.

YM: [Laughs] Of course, by the time I worked, finished working there, retired from there, the following year there was no more Thrifty. They had merged with another company and they merged, that company merged or something else, and now Rite Aid is actually part, part of Thrifty is right now Rite Aid.

SY: They merged.

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