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PW: So tell me, did you and Mineko have children?

LS: We have four. Our oldest is seventy-two, he's almost as old as I am. [Laughs] Our second is sixty-eight, she lives in Mill Valley, she never had children. Our third is about sixty-six, and she's the wife of Rinban Ito of Higashi Honganji Temple at Third and Central in L.A. Our youngest is probably the brightest, he's the PhD in biochem, he lives in Woodland Hills. Those three have seven children, and only one great-grandchildren. So Janet, my daughter's daughter, Mika, has the one great-grandchild.

PW: What are your children's names? What are your children's names?

LS: Oh, the oldest is Ken, Kenny, Kenneth, Joanne, her name is Linda Joanne, she goes by Joanne, L. Joanne Sakai. Our third is Janet Ito now, and Dennis Sakai is my youngest. Ken, it's the second marriage, but both marriages were Caucasian. Joanne married a Caucasian, Janet's married to a Japanese, Dennis is married to a Caucasian, so three out of four are.

PW: Also going back to postwar, I know now that you and your wife moved into your father-in-law's house. And then you had started working for the Driscoll farms, did you continue in that work or did you change?

LS: I worked there for thirteen years. Mainly I was managing the food processing plant, which basically worked at night. The strawberries are picked in the daytime and delivered to our big packing shed, and we started the shift at seven or eight o'clock at night and go 'til we finished. In the summertime, right around the first of July, the berries would peak. There'd be so many berries that they couldn't get rid of them, so a lot of it would come to what they called the cannery or the freezer. We'd call it the freezer because everything that we packed, if it didn't go directly out, went into the freezer, and then shipped by rail car to ice cream companies, jam manufacturers and grocery store chains all over the country. But that business petered out because even though Monterey County, Santa Cruz County, Santa Clara County, was the stronghold of the strawberries, eventually, San Diego, Oxnard, Santa Maria started growing, so the berries are just getting ripe now in our area in Northern California. Well, they've been ripe since January, down south, so they're shipping all that stuff. So we, up here, the growers up here lost that market. So the Driscoll company changed their process. No more freezer, fresh shipping only, and they began shipping by air. So now it wouldn't take a week to get to the East Coast, they could put a package on a pallet, suck the air out, and maybe put nitrogen in, but they would seal it, load it on an airplane, and next morning, it's in New York, Boston or wherever. So people on the East Coast are getting fresh berries the day after they were picked, never before. So Driscoll was getting at least a dollar a crate more than anybody else, because they had the best fresh strawberries of anybody.

Well, so now, they also owned what we called Strawberry Institute, in coordination with UC, University of California, developing new strands of strawberries. What they wanted was a large berry that would ship, had to be dry. You know, the normal, sweet strawberries were sugary, they only last one day, then they rot. Well, the new breed of strawberries was real big, you could bounce it like a tennis ball, wouldn't damage. The old original like Shasta berries, if you squeeze it too hard, pulling the stem off, it would bruise right away. Well, these, they don't taste good, there's no sugar, but they looked good, they're big, beautiful. Terrible, but that's the way they went. So now, the farmers used to plant the strawberries, second year, there were runners that would go out, they'd slip those in the ground and then keep planting the runners. Four or five years of strawberries. Each year the berries get a little smaller, finally, they disc it under and start all over. The Driscoll system was you plant, your first year berries are big, you pick the berries, disc it under, methyl bromide, fumigate -- that's when they could use it -- fumigate the soil, replant every year with a brand new plant, and they revolutionized the strawberry, fresh strawberry industry. So even though they headquartered in Watsonville, most of their berries are grown in Santa Maria, Oxnard, San Diego, the berry industry has changed. Now, Washington, the state of Washington also grows tons of strawberries, but most of those strawberries go to the freezing plants for jam. Because they have a different system, and it's always wet, so you have to pick 'em and process them right away. They won't last in the supermarket, they'll be rotten the day after, because there was so much damp. And out there, I think they even closed schools so the kids could go out and harvest strawberries like they do, like they used to do for prune picking in Santa Clara Valley. Schools didn't open until sometime in September when all the crops were picked. Now it's, what, June? I'm not sure, July, schools are starting so early now.

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