<Begin Segment 19>

AH: When you think back about the Rocky Nippon and the Rocky Shimpo, do you have a sense of pride, or do you have a sense of just tragedy that you suffered as a result of that situation? How do you feel about it?

SH: I feel it's a mixed sense, because I feel very proud of the fact that it was the biggest newspaper, and I think that the newspaper did a real service in letting people know about the events. And yet, at the end, I feel that it was a tragedy that my father had to leave with that kind of a circumstance, because I know that last time when he asked my husband to work for him, he was very sad. And then after he left the newspaper and it went bankrupt, I heard that it had gone bankrupt, and he was just such a different person. And I think that it was sad because the way he brought up the rest of the children, the youngest two, especially, I think as I talked to them, it was such a difference in his attitude. He didn't talk about education, he didn't talk about pride, he didn't do all the things that he talked about in the beginning when we were growing up. It wasn't that way anymore. And so these two younger ones said that, "Papa never said anything to us." He just was reading these journals and watching ballgames and all that.

AH: You talked earlier about your mother -- [addressing FA] -- let me just ask this question. Your mother entertaining the thought of suicide. And what I'd like to know is did you feel that your father actually did, in a poetic sense, commit suicide in his life by the way in which he closed off things that were important to him before?

SH: Yes, yes. I think he kind of, inside, he died.

AH: Okay. I think we're in a position to --

FA: When you visited your father at Santa Fe and your mother was talking to them and you saw armed guard, and I think we touched a nerve, that memory touched a nerve today. How did you feel when you saw your father talking to your mother there at Santa Fe?

SH: It was very sad to see him like that, because of all the people in Denver and growing up, he was probably the proudest man I knew. He was a very, very proud man, and I remember with the church people and all that, if he said something, then they listened. And he had a very loud voice. He used to do utai, he sang these songs and everything, and he would perform and do these things. And he was very proud of himself always. And when he walked, he walked with his head up, always with his head way up. And then to come home like that, it was just the saddest thing to see him. But he was a very smart man. I thought he was very smart because he not only brought the three younger kids with him to America, but he was kind of the big brother to the brothers he brought, and I think they looked up to him. And he kept, I think, one of the ones, his grandfather was with my father for quite a while during the time before he got married. And because I found some postcards that... my father had one album of old postcards, and some were addressed to Harold. And so that was my father's younger brother. So he took care of them. And he was a very smart man, and whatever he said or did, he was proud of, and he let people know how he felt. There was no two ways about it. If we did something wrong, we heard about it, and it was just, boom, that was it. His word was law with us. Especially me, I was probably the most sensitive. I felt that way. And so I believed my father was very smart. But even in the end, I thought that, as I left home, I thought one day that he's really a smart guy. Because they didn't have enough money to buy their last house, and it was a tiny, tiny house. I don't know how many years it was after they got out and they didn't have a house, and he thought that he had to buy a house. And so they bought a house where you pay rent with the option to buy. And he had a chart that he made up of how much, from one month to the next, each year would go into the principal and the interest and how it changed. And he showed me at the very last, when I went to visit him once, he said, "Look, we're going to actually have the house as our own next month." And he was very proud of that. And I thought, "I don't know how to figure it out." I went to college, I don't know how to figure it out. But he knew how to do that, and he had it all charted out. He was a smart man, and he didn't go to school much, but he was a very, very intelligent man, I thought.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.