<Begin Segment 17>

MN: Let me ask you a little bit about food. In New Orleans there weren't a lot, there weren't any Japanese vegetables?

AS: Not at that time, early part. Well, he decided one day he had to have otofu, so he asked our friend, Mr. Yenari, to (...) an actual box. He got the soybeans and everything, and you had to have calcium chloride, and I was elected to go to a pharmacy and ask them for calcium chloride. He wanted to know what I was going to do with it. I told him, and we were able to make tofu. I remember going through the whole motion by hand, with the cheesecloth and everything. It was really a luxury for us, but we missed it so.

MN: Did you share the tofu with other Japanese American families?

AS: (...) We probably did.

MN: what about like a garden? Did your family have a...

AS: Oh, yes, he loved that, too. We used to call it a victory garden in those days, and we had all different kinds of vegetables. He did plant... (...) sato imo?

MN: There's sato imo, yeah.

AS: Uh-huh, that's what it was. And so we just had them by the buckets. And so it was such a treat for us, he would ship it and mail it to his friends in Ohio, Cleveland, Cincinnati, because they didn't have any. (...)

MN: And you're also trying to rebuild your life after the war and everything was very tight. Can you share with us what kind of material you used to make dresses out of?

AS: Oh... chicken feed. And they were pretty nice prints. Made clothes with that, dresses.

MN: And when you say prints, were they different colors?

AS: Different colors like flowers.

MN: And they weren't rough?

AS: It was cotton. You couldn't even tell it was chicken feed. It's actual chicken feed sacks.

MN: Where did you get these sacks?

AS: Well, we knew a friend who was a chick sexer.

MN: And who made your clothes?

AS: We learned. I went to sewing school. That's another thing. I went to a sewing school in the city school system at night, so my parents could study English. They didn't know a word of English, and they went to school, and then that's how they became naturalized, 'cause they had to pass that test.

MN: Let me ask a little bit about the weather in New Orleans, especially the summertime. Was it like Rohwer?

AS: Worse. It was very, very humid, because it's surrounded by water. It's very unpleasant. Nighttime was just like ninety degrees. The humidity was ninety percent, it was very, very high. And, of course, we didn't have air conditioning. We had window fans. Are you familiar with those? You open the window and then there's a fan, put a fan in a box-like thing, it just goes into the window and the air will circulate. That's how it was.

MN: So you have this humidity problem, did you have mold problems?

AS: Oh, yes, mold growing, I'm telling you, we had to clean our closets every week, 'cause it was so moldy. That was the one thing I thought it was just terrible. Green mold growing everywhere.

MN: Now what about insects, mosquitoes and chiggers?

AS: We had mosquitoes, roaches, you name it. Chiggers, mosquitoes, a lot. Very unpleasant.

MN: And of course New Orleans had hurricanes. When did you experience your first hurricane? What was that like?

AS: 1946 I think it was. There was a river in front of our house, the street became a little river. The police came in little skiffs, rafts, to see if we needed any help, but we didn't go anywhere, we just went upstairs. We lived upstairs and went downstairs where our owner lived, and she just told us to come where she was so that's what we did. It was so funny because my dad, so crazy, made us wear our best shoes. I'll never forget those saddle Oxfords that we used to have. Dressed up, because that was it. Goes back many years.

MN: When you mean "that was it," did he think you were going to die?

AS: (Yes), he thought if this is it, the floodwater's coming down, we're gonna be inundated. That's how they tell you on the radio. It was very scary, but there was a river in front of our house. It's not a street anymore. But we experienced two of those. 1948 was another one it was very bad, where we couldn't even go out to the next block. And to get our groceries, the grocery store came to our house on a skiff to deliver the groceries. I don't know how many days it was, but water didn't recede for some time. That's when a lot of our things got wet. All my dolls got wet.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.