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TI: And I'm just curious, what memories, if any, do you have of Tacoma? I know you were young, but what can you remember from Tacoma?

KY: Well, I can remember going to school, in grammar school, from the sawmill where my father worked, we had a house there. And going on the streetcar across the river, and going to school, it was on top of a hill. That I remember when I was a kid, I never forget that. Then as far as I was, my neighborhood was concerned, we lived near a canal. And I imagine the canal was built more or less for the sawmill. But anyway, our outhouses were over the canal. That's where outhouses were, over the canal, and it was built on boards over the canal, and the toilet was right on top.

TI: So let me understand. So your house was near the canal, and then, like in the back of the house, there was an outhouse.

KY: That's right.

TI: And that was suspended over the canal?

KY: Canal.

TI: And so after you finished doing your business, it would just fall into...

KY: It'd go right into the canal. So that was the sewer system.

[Interruption]

TI: Oh, that's a good story because I know my kids really don't know what an outhouse is, and that was just a common thing to have. So the other houses, were they all kind of doing the same thing, do you remember?

KY: The other house? Oh, yeah, because we were out on the farm. And so there was no indoor toilet, it was an outhouse. They had regular outhouse building, some of them would have two seats, and some of 'em had one seat. So if there was one seat, you just wait your turn. [Laughs] And we couldn't afford toilet paper, so my mother used to get books, and the paper, they were pretty soft paper. That became our toilet paper. And we grew up with that for years.

TI: And so how big was your house? When you have, at that point, five kids and your parents...

KY: There was about two or three bedroom. There was five kids, but you know, we all slept in one room, more or less. And so I think there was, we had one or two, I think about three rooms, but I know my mother and my father slept in with the kids, with the girls or something like that. Because we didn't have that many bedrooms and there were five kids. So we just, like when we go to eat, we never had chairs. We had chairs on the end, but they were mostly benches. And that's the way we were brought up, like out on the farm.

TI: Do you recall what kind of meals you had?

KY: Oh, yeah, we had a regular Japanese meal, because my mother was from Japan. So it was all miso soup and rice. But at one time I remember we were very poor in Washington, because my father was a, liked to have a good time. So he spent a lot of his money having a good time. [Laughs] So my mother had to go out and pick dandelions and mushrooms in the wintertime, and things like that, and we lived on that. But it was fantastic. As I grew up, they're selling dandelions as vegetables. So I said, well, gee, I had that when I was a kid and I was a poor man. But now they're selling that in groceries, and they're asking nice prices for it. I said, oh, ridiculous. [Laughs]

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.