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TI: But going back to your regular school, tell me about your classmates. How many, like, Japanese were, were...

MK: There were not too many. We had, probably in every class there were only about two or three Japanese kids.

TI: And then the other kids, what kind of nationalities or races were there?

MK: Mostly like German and Italian and then English, Irish and Scotch.

TI: And were they generally the children of other farmers? Or what kind of...

MK: Well, they didn't do much farming. Lot of the men went to town to work, and they had houses, maybe about an acre or something like that, but they didn't have any big acreage. Our neighbor, which was the Adams, they had a strip of land and so we, my father sectioned off a strip of land next to theirs. So we had a co-op cow, so we shared the cows, and every time our cow gave milk theirs were breeding so that we always had milk. But they found out that Japanese people can't drink milk, cow milk, so my father went and bought two goats, and so now he went and had the same routine with the goats. And so we all drank goat milk 'cause we couldn't tolerate the cow milk. But the goat milk was free of lactaid so we...

TI: And he did this also with the Adams, that goat sharing?

MK: No, they didn't care about the goats.

TI: They just wanted the cow.

MK: Yeah, but every so many, about every year or so we would have a, we would have to breed the goats so that we would have...

TI: Did any other people -- so you couldn't drink cow's milk so you had goat's milk --

MK: That's right.

TI: Were there other people that also wanted the goat's milk?

MK: Yeah, but we didn't sell it or anything. But there was a man from town that had a daughter that couldn't drink milk and she was, they were Caucasian. And so he would come maybe about five or six miles on a bicycle every morning and my father would have these little cans like that with the handle on, and he put milk in there, leave it on the, what we call, when I think about it now, we used to sell cherries and stuff like that, it's a little dinky shed-looking thing and we used to sell cherries and stuff like that from that. He put that bucket there. Well, when evacuation came my father said, "We'll give you the goat." He lived in town and he couldn't take the goat, and we just watched that grown man cry. He couldn't, he couldn't, and I guess they couldn't buy goat milk, or I don't know what it was, how it was.

TI: So go back to this man crying because, he was sad because he didn't have any more goat milk, or he was --

MK: That's right.

TI: Or he was sad because, or touched that your father would give him the goats?

MK: Well, we'd, he was giving him free goat milk for, this was years. It's not like, I mean, it was just like we can't eat, drink all that milk, so my father, don't matter who it is, if they want the milk... but my mother cooked and baked with goat milk all the time. Only thing that we really shared with the cow was the butter, and so we would, everybody made their own butter.

TI: I want to go back to this man crying. I'm trying to understand why he would cry, whether he was, one, sad that no more goat milk, or two, that he was maybe touched by the kindness of being offered the goat, or maybe three, that he was sad that the family had to go away?

MK: Yeah. Well, there would be no more goat milk for his daughter.

TI: So you think it was that, he was just sad that --

MK: Yeah. And he was very upset that --

TI: 'Cause he must've been very appreciative that he got free goat milk.

MK: Yeah. I mean, that was, anything that we had, unless we could sell it, we did, we... I mean, like going back to all of us, there was the hospital in town, which is like the closest, where the New Westminster, which is the closest town, and there's a hospital there, and I used to wonder how we would, any time we were sick or had to do something we would go to this hospital, you know? Well, one day my father loaded up the truck and cases and cases of apples, and he'd take it to the hospital, and then he goes through that entrance and they unload all the apples. And that's how we paid for our hospitalization. It was like a barter system, potatoes and whatever we could barter for. That was our care. So I guess when you really think about it, it was an ideal way to go because they would've had to...

TI: And this was probably, again, during the Depression time and so, yeah, food was really valuable, to have that.

MK: That's right.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.