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BN: And then wanted to shift now to, had some interesting stories about working in the summers out in central California. How did that come about?

RO: Well, my cousin, who is a year older than me, had gone. There were camps, JA, older men, generally, would go to pick grapes. And so there was one that my cousin went to the year before. So he told me about it and I said, "Oh, I want to go too." So the next year, he and I went. And it was a camp with just JA workers, it wasn't owned by JAs, but it was the workers, and almost all of them were old men who were having a tough time making it in this area. And then there were maybe ten or fifteen young guys about, still in high school, and that was kind of funny, too, because there were kids from the west side, and there were just a very few of us from the east side. I almost got into a fight there because the kids on the other side... I was a big mouth and they got mad at me for making all that noise. But my cousin, who was from the west side, just calmed them down and said he would make sure I behaved better. [Laughs] So I was saved by that. Then after that was his last year, and I was still in high school, so I went a couple more years. And it was a terrific experience to, a sixteen year old kid, take time in the summer away from the family on your own.

BN: Was the money pretty good?

RO: Money was never very good. [Laughs]

BN: Well, relative, maybe, to what you could do in the city.

RO: Yeah, I think we got two dollars a day, something like that. And we paid, I think, one dollar for the food and place to stay. Maybe more, maybe five dollars, I don't know. But back then, five dollars wasn't a bad number.

BN: But when you came back for the summer, you had, you came back with...

RO: Just a little bit of money.

BN: The older men, are these Issei?

RO: Isseis, yeah.

BN: So these are single Issei farm workers. So they did that. Did they do that the whole year? Well, I guess, it's seasonal work.

RO: It's seasonal, and they would go from camp to camp. So I don't know how long ours lasted, maybe three or four weeks, something like that. Then they would move on to another place.

BN: Did you ever talk to them?

RO: No.

BN: You kind of hung out with, there was the young group and the older group.

RO: Yeah, exactly.

BN: They were probably also Japanese-speaking.

RO: Yeah, they were.

BN: But there were was more of them than of you.

RO: Oh, definitely. And the first year I was there, they were just very upset because I didn't know how to pick grapes. They complained about, not just me, some of the others that had just started. But by the second year, I knew what I was doing, they stopped complaining about me.

BN: Who were the farmers? Were they Japanese farmers?

RO: Well, I think they were white, but the people worked there were all JAs.

BN: Was there like a foreman or a contractor or whatever?

RO: No, they were all JA, yeah, everybody, all the way up to the person running it.

BN: Right. So there was kind of an organizer or a boss who was also Japanese.

RO: Right, right. So it was a great experience for me, I didn't mind working there.

BN: So if you're sixteen, seventeen, this is like early 1950, 1951, early '50s. Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't heard of that before.

RO: You didn't do that when you were going to school, huh?

BN: No.

RO: You were one of those nice kids.

BN: Well, I don't even know if they did that in the... this is twenty-five, thirty years later. Yeah, I've never heard a story like this, of city kids kind of going off like that into these rural areas. But yeah, that's interesting.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.