<Begin Segment 17>

TI: So now you're married, so what's next? What do you do after you get married?

CH: Well, of course, no, Bill had to get a job. So he went... he got a garage job, that was it, and he worked in the garage. And while he was working in the garage, I remember walking down... yeah, I took him lunch, I made lunch by -- not made lunch, I think I must have bought some sandwiches or something. I remember going to that garage and giving him lunch, but I don't... then what did I do? I think I fooled around for a week and it was getting boring. Then I thought I'd better work, so what did I do?

TI: Was it like an office type of job?

CH: Yeah. I can't remember... but in the meantime, Bill's talking about, well, he'd like to try to get his brothers out of camp, too. [Interruption] He was thinking of getting his brothers out so that they could go farming somewhere outside of Spokane. And he knew the... can't think of the name in Moses Lake. They used to live in Seattle, and they moved to Moses Lake when the West Coast was getting... and they were established, not established, but they had a potato farm. So Bill contacted them and they said, yeah, we could use some help, but not permanently, I mean, just get him settled. And so in the meantime, the Grand Coulee Dam was taking the houses down, so I guess those people must have told Bill that maybe the housing is available if he contacted them. So Bill must have contacted them, and anyway, the house was being moved Grand Coulee, and they moved here right onto the farm, and that's how we got... I mean, it's a pretty good house at that time, a one-bedroom, but it had a kitchen.

TI: So when they moved these houses, so the housing, so these worker kind of housing.

CH: Worker houses, yeah.

TI: And they moved it to the farm of the friends that you were going to stay with?

CH: Yeah. In the meantime, we were already in these little cabins. From Spokane, we moved to a little cabin, and just one of those, again...

TI: It's like a little shack.

CH: Shacks. Really, just only shacks, because they were just... well, that's where she was born.

TI: Like a single room in a shack.

CH: Single room and a potbelly stove for a stove. Then I had a lean-to, and it had... I don't know if it had piping in there or not, but I think Bill's dad fixed it up for us to make a kitchen out of it. It had a lean-to, kind of an open thing, and then he closed it up.

TI: Now, the shack and the lean-to, was this now on property that Bill had bought?

CH: No.

TI: It was still the friend's.

CH: It was still out there in the open. In fact, there were a lot of other shacks there, too. So it was kind of like a motel at one time before the war. Little tiny cabins, huh? Grandpa and Grandma stayed in one, and then we had the, Grandpa made that lean-to and then put a bedroom on the other side, too.

TI: So this was a place that was established so that Bill's brothers could come?

CH: I don't know how... we must have bought it, because how could you add on to some, you know...

TI: Well, because in my notes it says that eventually he bought three hundred acres?

CH: Yeah, this is before that.

TI: Okay, right. So this is before he was established...

CH: Established, and we just got out of camp, so we don't, I mean, from Spokane, so we don't know what we're gonna do yet. But he purposely really wanted to get his brothers out. And then when they did get his brothers out, they decided to get their parents out, too, out of camp, to do some farmwork. And this family that they knew said Moses Lake is a growing, I mean, it's starting to grow potatoes, and we saw what kind of potatoes by, you could see by the pictures that we had the potatoes, when they dug it up, bunches.

TI: They were just these big...

CH: Big, nice big potatoes.

TI: There were so many of them.

CH: It was just rich ground.

TI: So it sounds like as you were establishing this, that at some point a decision was made, well, let's buy land.

CH: Let's buy land, that's right. And then, because then, by that time, the boys were, the three boys were already here, and they were trying to get his mother out. And then we happened to know... who's that helper? You know, that guy, that kid that worked with us for years and years and years? Tako. What was the last name? Tako. And they were all in these little cabins, and then that's... I think Bill decided, well, he'd better, you know, try to look for some land. Because that Japanese family that were established there, told him how. So first of all, Bill found a job with a farmer that was just... he was living in a nice house, and then he had some little cabins there. And so he said, well, you could start, you could farm the three hundred acres on this side -- not three hundred, there must have been a few hundred acres on this side, which was not... so they did. And they found out that it was pretty good, we had good crop. That's when he decided, the boys decided, well, we'd better buy some land. And that's where they bought the three hundred acres, where the Grand Coulee, where the water was coming through, and you could tap on, and you pay so much a month for the water from Grand Coulee Dam. And then about the time we farmed there, maybe, oh, I can't remember. It wasn't very long, three or four years, maybe longer than that, because we built a house on it. So we might have stayed there about... how long were you, you remember junior high and then how much longer when we left?

TI: So fifteen years?

CH: Yeah. Well, not quite that long. But I think, well, fifteen years. Okay, we lived there that long.

TI: And during that time, were you, was Bill primarily a farmer then?

CH: Yeah, oh, yeah. We bought our home place. But in the meantime, that was... in those days, they take thousands of, they rent. And at that time, there were lots of land to be rented, because this was raw land by then. And so he got... by the time we left, anyway, he had already leased, I mean, they were leasing thousands of acres. I mean, it was just like, you know his brother, his brother Jack and Mike, and they take responsibility of so many acres here, so many acres here and farming. They were doing really big farming at that time.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.