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MN: Now, from Glendale, Arizona, your family moved to Los Angeles. This is 1949 that they moved, does that sound right?

IH: '46, '47, '48... might be '49.

MN: Now once your family got to Los Angeles, what did your father do?

IH: He started his business in Imperial Valley, although the family had the home in Los Angeles. He thought he had business opportunities in Imperial Valley where a lot of the Japanese had resettled and started farming. So he opened a small store in a little town called Calipatria. But didn't stay there very long. He soon moved the store to a town called Niland, N-I-L-A-N-D. And, of course, the opportunity was to sell seeds, but he branched out into fertilizer and insecticide, farm supplies, things that small famers needed to produce crops. So that started about 1949. But we kept our house in Los Angeles while I went to school, Los Angeles City College. We would commute once in a while, back and forth.

MN: That's a long commute, from Los Angeles to Imperial Valley.

IH: Yeah, it's about two hundred miles.

MN: But I wanted to ask you earlier, though, didn't your father want to go into like escrow or real estate?

IH: Yeah. After the war, he came to Los Angeles. Took a trip from Phoenix, I guess, to Los Angeles. Found a hotel room in Little Tokyo. He wanted to get into some kind of work that was more permanent. He thought real estate would be an opportunity, but not being an American citizen, he couldn't get a job. And at that time, Little Tokyo was still transitioning from a predominately black community, and he didn't appreciate that because of the music and the noise. I guess you might say he was turned off with the community at that point. But he had a... I know he sort of connected up with a gentleman by the name of Gongoro Nakamura. I don't know what resulted from that, but he was looking for opportunities of some kind where he could use his education, his language skills. But I don't think it amounted to much.

[Interruption]

MN: So now going back to your father opened his business in Imperial Valley again, he's commuting from Imperial Valley to Los Angeles, is that right?

IH: Well, yeah, but very infrequently. Only when he had an opportunity to do so. Pick up supplies and that sort of thing.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.