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LT: Your parents had a grocery store. Can you tell us about the store, the kids of goods that you had, the relationship with your neighbors who came to the store?

GI: Sure. Our store on Kalmia Street, it was a little storefront with a door in the middle. You'd walk in and there'd be the counter on the right and shelves on the left, and I think a little refrigerator area in the back and a vegetable bench in the front.

[Interruption]

GI: So it was mostly American food, and maybe some Mexican tamales that all us kids always ate the inventory up before they could be sold, so that didn't last for very long. But the people that came in were just people in the neighborhood, and people that we saw every day and knew and knew their kids, and the kids would come in and buy candy and that sort of thing, just a regular grocery store.

LT: You were giving a great description of the store. Can you tell us again what it looked like when it came in?

GI: Sure. You'd go in the store and there was a screen door, I remember. And on the right was a counter, a glass topped counter where the tamales used to be. And on the left was the bench where the vegetables were, all the fresh vegetables. I recall my father taking me with him from time to time to the Central Market to buy the vegetables and bring them back for the store. And then there were shelves of canned goods and milk and that sort of thing, bread, just staples.

LT: And a tamale steamer.

GI: Uh-huh.

LT: Did you sell Japanese goods?

GI: I really don't know. But we did for our meals, I would think it would be maybe at least a third Japanese type, tsukemono and ochazuke and all that kind of stuff. But it was a lot of pork chops and chicken fried steak from the store, and our dad would carve all the meat up and stuff.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.