<Begin Segment 23>

TI: But tell me a little bit about your father, because you mentioned earlier how when the war started he was still in the prime of his life, sounded like it was, before the war, a very successful farm operation.

ES: Yes.

TI: That he had a boat, he could do things, send his daughter to school at a nursing school and things like that, and then the war happened. He comes back, his house and everything's burned down.

ES: So that's why he decided he couldn't go back to the farm again. He decided, well, evidently that was, there was nothing to go back to because there was no house on the farm.

TI: And what was his demeanor? I mean, how did he accept all this? What was he like at this point?

ES: Well, evidently he decided that he didn't have to farm in his later years, but then he was still in his fifties. That's young. In fact, we thought it was old, but now they think it's old because... and he didn't live, well he lived 'til he was eighty-nine, but when people were in their sixties we used to think that was pretty old.

TI: But did you see bitterness on his part about --

ES: Hmm?

TI: Did you see much bitterness on his part?

ES: I think he just thinks it's shikata ga nai, can't help it. But he, and I don't know why, how he got enough money to, how he had enough money to buy or lease a hotel. I don't know what he did. He did buy that hotel so that we could live in it when we were getting our house cleaned up when we moved back, because we had a house.

TI: So in Portland he bought a hotel to run as a business.

ES: Uh-huh. It was like a pensioner's hotel and it wasn't much of a hotel, but anyway, you could see that some of the homeless people are sitting in the doorway for shelter. It wasn't a very good hotel, but anyway, it was a place where people did come in and stay overnight, or maybe they stayed for a week, I don't know. But anyway, when we did come back we were able to stay in their hotel because they had an extra room.

TI: The reason you did this was, you mentioned earlier how your house was trashed. I mean, it was unlivable when you got back.

ES: It was unlivable. We were there in the hotel for a month. But then after we were there for a while my mother finally decided, we want to go back to the farm and rebuild, just build a new house. And I wondered why she made up her mind. She says, "I wanted one carrot."

TI: One fresh farm carrot.

ES: Carrot for a stew or something. And I said, and she says, "But I have to go out to the store and buy it." She just couldn't figure, she just couldn't stand that. She said, gee, if we had a farm there's a carrot in the ground all winter. You can, don't have to go to the store and buy it. So they finally, and my second brother that was the fourth one in the family, he went to, during the war, he went to University of Nebraska, because he was at Oregon State when the war broke out, but he graduated from University of Nebraska in horticulture. And he wanted to farm and so he decided when he got back that he could farm, go back and, and my dad had that land and so my brother's planning on -- but then, see, they, my oldest brother, Tats, he was already on the farm. No, he wasn't working on the farm either yet. No, he was still, he was, still wasn't married. He was living at the hotel helping my folks with the hotel. They had to make beds just about every night on the whole place. He was still single.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.