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PW: What kind of farming did you do? What were the crops that your family grew?

LS: The five acres in Montebello was a lath house. We grew what they called Asparagus plumosus fern. It was something the florists would use as a spray and the bouquet, and there weren't too many people growing that. The ranch out in the Blue Hills area, we had maybe five acres of fig tree, we had maybe five acres of flower peach blossoms, and we probably grew... I remember string beans, celery, what else did we grow? Basic vegetables that you could harvest in the summertime, and it kept us pretty busy.

PW: Can you describe what the home itself was like? So I understand you lived with your mother and father and your sisters lived with your aunt, but can you describe what the house looked like, what your rooms and the kitchen was like?

LS: The house that my aunt and uncle, I think they bought it. I don't think they had it made, because that whole area, it was a regular house with, they had a front porch with these square pillars, and you see those occasionally, so they're dated back to maybe 1915, 1920, and a lot of the houses were built in that same fashion. And most Japanese farmers lived in, you might say, shacks, and they built whatever they could and gradually improved the shacks into live buildings. And in those days, very few had indoor plumbing, the farmers all had an outhouse. We were in the city, we had indoor plumbing, so it was quite a plus.

PW: Did you have chores or things you had to do in the house as well as in the farm?

LS: Well, because we were pretty much in the city, growing up in Montebello, once in a while they would ask me to water the ferns. We had pipes overhead that would go back, and, well, you had to manually turn it one way and then when it was wet, turn it back the other way, and then shut it off north of the next one. And that would be my job, but it wasn't all the time, it was once in a while. So I didn't really do too many chores except summertime when I wasn't in school, I spent most of my time at the ranch.

PW: You mentioned you have sisters, so tell me about your siblings, and tell me the order and birth in their names.

LS: Well, my older sister was seven years older than me. She passed away about five years ago at ninety-seven. My younger sister, she was the second child, younger than my older sister by about three, four years. She died in 1936, she was fourteen years old. She had a condition called "blue baby," I think it's a very minor surgery now to correct it, it's some kind of a leakage in the heart. In those days, they didn't know what to do, so they just let her die. She laid in her bed for about three months before she died.

PW: What were your sisters' names, both of them?

LS: Misako was the older, Mieko, M-I-E-K-O, was the younger one.

PW: So you were the baby.

LS: And I'm the third and last. That's why my name is little funny, it's spelled I-I-C-H-I-R-O, Iichiro. So I don't know, they emphasized the "Ii." [Laughs]

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.