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TI: Okay, so tell me what your parents did for work, starting with your father. What kind of work did your father do? He started off doing farm work.

KT: He started out doing farm work and he got, he was kicked by a horse and I think he fractured his skull, and I think he was sort of out of it for a couple years. And as he recovered, then he went to work for the railroad, and he was a, what do you call 'em, gandy dancers, they repair tracks and things like that. And that, that's all he did from then on.

TI: And which railroad did he work for?

KT: Northern Pacific.

TI: And what was the term, he was a gandy dancer? I've never heard that, gandy...

KT: Yeah, they called 'em, they called 'em gandy dancers because they use the shovel and they, like they replace the tie, a tie is bad and they pull it out and they'll put another one in. Then they get gravel and cinder and stuff, and they tap it underneath it to firm it up. They were just railroad laborers on the, track laborers is what they were.

TI: And the crew that your father worked with, was it...

KT: In Auburn they had a Japanese foreman, and there must've been four or five Japanese Isseis working. They would work that and they would work in the roundhouse where they'd bring in these, what do you call these, freight, freight cars, and they would clean 'em out.

TI: Now, working for the railroad, was that considered a good job for an Issei back then?

KT: At the time, it was steady pay. [Laughs] Whereas when you're farming, you don't have a pay, like in the wintertime, and everything is, you sign a contract for, like you're gonna raise peas or beans or berries, and then you take the contract to the bank and they lend you money.

TI: So having, working for the railroad, you get a steady paycheck, which, this is kind of during the Depression time too, so it's probably a useful thing to have during this time, to have a steady paycheck.

KT: Yeah. It was good.

TI: Good. Did your father ever talk about the job, any interesting stories about working the railroad?

KT: No.

TI: Let's talk about your mother. So what did your mother, I mean, one is raising the family. She had lots of children.

KT: Well, she took over the farm. She took over the farm and ran us kids, do all the farm work.

TI: And so how large was the farm? I mean, how many acres?

KT: Not too big. I don't know, berry fields were about two, three acres, I guess, raspberries.

TI: Okay.

KT: And then we had maybe three, four acres of truck gardening, which takes a lot of work, lettuce, cucumber, carrots.

TI: And what would you do with the produce? I mean, who would you sell it to?

KT: Like cucumbers would be a contract with Libby's, Libby, McNeill and Libby. And let's see, berries was something we sold to a Japanese store in Auburn. I don't know, he didn't, it wasn't a grocery store or anything, but he had the means of shipping it, so he would ship these raspberries express to Montana or Chicago or, but we would sell it to him. And later on when we got into blackberries, it was, I don't know, some association, berry growers association that would, I don't really know what the connection there was, but we signed a contract that the, everything they grow would be sold to them.

TI: Okay. So your mother was a pretty hard worker, then.

KT: Oh yeah.

TI: To run a farm with a lot, in some cases, some young children too. She had some young kids.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.