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TI: I'm going to ask some questions about your father now. So what was your father's name?

DI: The Americans gave him, his landlord gave him the name Henry. Hikojiro Kobayashi.

TI: And where was he from in Japan?

DI: He was from Mie-ken, Japan.

TI: And what kind of work did he do in Japan, his family?

DI: I don't know what their family did in Japan. All I know is when he came here, he was sent by his parents. They were here first. Then when he came here, it was a big farming operation that his father had, and that was in Mountain View. Apparently he had a farm where he had tenant farmers who stayed in around the farm, and they harvested strawberries, other berries, and they trucked it to the city.

TI: About what year was that when he came over?

DI: Oh, my. He was eleven, so he was born in 1896, and eleven after that. My math is not good.

Tom Ikeda: So 1907.

DI: 1907? That sounds about right.

TI: And he was about how old, you said, eleven when he arrived?

DI: He arrived here when he was about eleven. He always said that. He never mentioned the year, but he was eleven. And he went to the same grammar school that my brothers went to later on, well, it was the same school district, different school. He had one of his old teachers even. That was interesting. The teacher told him that his father was a better student.

TI: So can you tell us a little bit more about what he was like, his personality?

DI: My father was very easygoing, he laughed a lot, he was musical. When I played the piano, he would dance to it rhythmically. So he had a musical ear. He was a very hard worker, but he never complained. He was very good in math, in mechanical drawing type things. He would invent mechanical things to make his equipment run better. He built his own blacksmith shop back at the barn so he could mould his tools that he would attach to his tractors. He learned all this from a Swiss blacksmith who lived around three houses away on Alma Street, he'd go over there and make the big sugar beet beds for his truck, shaping the iron to hold all that wood framing to back of the truck and have it lift up so it would spill the sugar beets over into the train cars, I guess. And after borrowing and going back and forth to the blacksmith, he just decided to build his own, and that's what he did. And we had the job of, you know the bellows that you have to turn to heat up the coal? That was my brother and my job. It was fascinating, though.

TI: And what kind of expectations did he have for you? You talked about what your mother wanted you to do, but what about your father?

DI: He didn't talk about things like that to me. He was just very loving. I guess he spoiled me. And my mother was the one that did the critiquing... he would talk through her, and I would get it. So I learned all the things that I think my mother wanted me to learn if I were an ojousan growing up in Japan. And so she had me take piano lessons, odori lessons, I didn't get around to ikebana, I did that on my own. And go to school, the upper grades, things like that. She wanted to send me to Japan during my grammar school years, but at the last moment she lost heart and couldn't do it. But she had the passport, my picture all ready to go, and at the last minute she couldn't let go of me. So I stayed and finished school, Mountain View. Oh, was I glad. [Laughs]

TI: You were the oldest then, right?

DI: I was the oldest, yes, uh-huh. And the only girl. So she wanted to bring me up like an ojousan rather than a farmer's daughter, I think. I didn't know the difference, I was just glad I didn't have to go anyplace. I was very relieved later when I understood all of this. At that time I was too young to know.

TI: Can you tell us more about your siblings? So you had just brothers then?

DI: I've got brothers. Oldest one was Albert Kazuhiko, second one is Robert Toshihiro, third one was Harry Mikio, and the last one is Roy Torao, born in the Year of the Tiger. Same as my mother, born in the Year of the Tiger. So out of the four, my brother Albert, an avid 49er fan. After a winning 49er game and on the bus coming home, he collapsed and died on the bus. And then my third brother Harry, during a holiday when his daughter took her sons to Disneyland, she came back during the holidays, Christmas holidays, to find her father lying in the hallway dead. And he had an aneurysm of the aorta, and that's what did, that exploded, I guess.

TI: And your two other brothers, Robert and Roy...

DI: Yes, now I've got two left. I've got my second one, Robert, he's down in the Los Angeles area at Huntington Beach, and I have one in Penn Valley, that's across from Grass Valley. Everyone knows about Grass Valley and they've never heard of Penn Valley, but it's neighboring.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.