<Begin Segment 23>

SY: And how, so you, by this time you were dismissed from the army. They had let you go, so did you go back to working at the restaurant to support...

HS: Well, there was a different chef, and by rights he would've had to, if I'd insisted on it, but since I didn't know the chef and I wasn't gonna push the fact... but so I started collecting the twenty dollars, I think, that they give you when you're, it was twenty dollars, I don't know for how, was it a week or what it was. But anyway, I collected that until finally I just decided, well, I don't have a job, so I said the best thing to do would be go back to Los Angeles. Then my aunt had her son's house in Los Angeles, and so my mom wrote and said if she had room for us. And so she said yes, so I just packed everything up, bought a little Studebaker Champion for nine hundred bucks and bought that, packed some stuff up, and then shipped the other stuff by rail back to Los Angeles. Then I had the little Champion, I drove to Chicago to see my cousins over there. And then my cousin who was working in a warehouse, and so everything in the backseat that I didn't need, he packed up in a shipping carton and mailed it back to my aunt in Los Angeles. [Laughs]

SY: So what did you do with the house, the...

HS: I sold the house. I bought it for four thousand dollars, and the payments were only twenty dollars a month. I said, "No wonder people can buy a house and property there." And I think I sold it with the furniture and everything for seven thousand dollars, so I had that much money and drove with a car that I spent for nine hundred bucks, and I drove all the way back. First I went to Chicago and saw my cousins there, and then I went to Denver, and then my -- my cousin there, he's older, but he was almost the same age as my mother -- then I stayed with them one or two days, and then I drove Denver back to Los Angeles. Then I stayed, lived with my aunt. This is my cousin's mother in Denver, anyway, so he was glad, so he said, "Oh good," he says, "You'll help take care of my mother." And so...

SY: So did you bring your mother and your brother with you when you moved in --

HS: Yeah.

SY: -- when you moved back to Los Angeles?

HS: We drove all the way, I drove all the way. My brother didn't have a driver's license. That's the longest trip, and I don't think I'll ever take a long trip again, never. [Laughs]

SY: So your mother actually, was that your mother's family that was in all these different places, your, or your father's family? The cousins that you visited, was, so...

HS: Well, the Yamauchi family... well, the Yamauchi family and Shishino family are intermarried, so George was a Yamauchi.

SY: So they were, I see, so your friends really became family, then.

HS: Yeah.

SY: So they married into your family.

HS: Yeah, so the Yamauchi family lived in Gardena, so we were always visiting over there.

SY: So who, so who in your family were they married to? How did that happen?

HS: Well, it's in Japan that, that they were married.

SY: So it's your mother's --

HS: But that's why my father and Mr. Yamauchi were brother-in-laws, and so then there was another, Mr. Yamauchi's younger brother, and so our three families were always close all our lives. And we still are.

SY: And you're not sure whether that was on your mother's side or your father's side that you, these, all these, the marriages were...

HS: Between the two Yamauchi families being married, why, basically they were... [laughs].

SY: They were married to your mother's family or your father's family?

HS: That would be my father's family, yeah, come to think of it.

SY: So their family became cousins and you've, so these are --

HS: 'Cause on my mother's side I haven't really met hardly anybody. I think one time I, one of her nieces or nephews came to Los Angeles.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.