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VY: Okay. So now you're been born. Tell me a little bit about your childhood before the war growing up in your house. What's one of your earliest memories?

MM: Working. What family life means to me is cooperation. Whatever the event, the parents and the two, my brother and I would do it together. For instance, at the beginning of the war, they had rationing. So my father decided to go into chicken raising because they didn't need all this bureaucratic stickers or points to have meat, what do you call them? Anyway, so we could sell chickens. So he and mother -- oh, you have to know that the post office is a place where it had a great big book about this high, three inches high, made out of newspaper, and had all the things you can order from the government printing office. So if you wanted to learn how to raise chickens, you'd order the pamphlet on learning how to raise chickens. If you're chickens got coccidiosis, you got a pamphlet for what to do for coccidiosis. If you wanted to raise corn, they'll tell you why you couldn't raise corn in a line, you had to raise it in a square and this, that and the other thing. So they had a pamphlet for everything. If you wanted to learn plumbing and electrical, they had a pamphlet for that. So it's like the internet is today.

VY: I was just thinking that.

MM: But it was in the 1940s in this blue pamphlet, and I think my parents were the only college-educated people in the town, so I think they were the only ones that really used it, these pamphlets that you got, you ordered through the post office. And I don't think most of the people know what a wonderful service the post office did at that particular time.

VY: Yeah, I didn't know that you could do that. So you go in and you find one on the list, and you order it and they...

MM: They give you a little profile of what it's about, and then you order it and then you get it and it's maybe about five pages long and four pages folded over, these little tiny booklets. And that's how they learned how to do plumbing in the house. Because remember I told you, they had this desire to buy two acres, but they had no money? How are they going to buy two acres? So they found a house on two acres that had been on sale for ten years, hadn't been sold. So it had no running water, it had a pump with a red handle, it had an upscale outhouse, two holes, two holes. Outhouses can be pretty shoddily built if they're one hole, but for two holes, they put a little more effort in. And then they had electricity. There was no heat in the house, so my mother and father, they dug out the cellar to make (room for) a furnace, and to make another room for the coke. But to have cooking facilities and heating facilities, my mother went to Sears and Roebucks. At that time, it was during depression, 1938, and she said, "We will buy the furnace from you if you lend us a wood burning stove with an oven in it," and they did. And by the time they finished digging out and ready to put in a furnace downstairs, and a place for the coke to come in, because that was more efficient than coal, they were on their way to developing their family farm unit with heat. And then they had plumbing to put in there, you know, to get rid of the outhouse. So we had these potties, and then because it was too cold to go out at night, so we had these potties on the stair. And my mother said, "Aren't we so lucky? We're just like the pioneers; we have this challenge." So we were always, every weekend we did something to fix up the house, to participate in the building of the new place, to have a toilet, indoor toilet. So the indoor plumbing for a sink, instead of going out and pumping it. So we have a hot water heater instead of heating it up on the stove, I mean, so many wonderful... that was, "Aren't we lucky? We're like the pioneers, every little thing." So growing up was, "Oh isn't this fun? I wonder what project we're going to do for the next weekend."

So we raised, they learned how to raise chickens, the chickens, day old chickens would come. Did you know that the people that determined whether they were boy or girl chickens were the Japanese chick sexers? So, of course, I was able to see how chickens were sexed when I was a little kid. My father took me to the chick sexers as part of my education. But they were so fast, I couldn't understand how they could do it so fast. And so we raised goats, chickens, and we lived in this place which was just outside the city. So everybody would get a cute little puppy, and when it became a juvenile, "Oh, we don't want this, it's too energetic." So they'd take it in the country and throw it out and it could take care of itself. So my mother was always finding these youthful dogs needing a home, not knowing what to do herself, so she'd bring it home. And she would find out what the character of the dog was, and then she'd look for a house, a home for it. She'd first advertise it in the newspaper, and she'd give it away. And a year later she called, oh, they don't have the dog anymore. So she started charging two dollars. If they paid two dollars, a year later, they still had the dog. So she was learning all these lessons about how life went on, and she would tell us about how things were working. The barter system is very, very common with communities that have farming or nothing, so a lot of bartering for work or things. So we could, during the Second World War, we had butter because the neighbors had cows and they gave us the cream, we exchanged them for chickens. So we didn't have it too bad during the Second World War for food, because we lived in the country.

VY: What were the neighbors' living circumstances? Were they also, like were their other farms around?

MM: Oh, they were bigger farms. At the end of the war, there were no agricultural farm workers. No... what do you call them? They used to be braceros or migrant workers, they didn't have any migrant farmworkers because they were taken into the military. So children from the public schools were taken out, so I had to get up at five-thirty in the morning to go cut asparagus, and then I'd go to school. And in the summertime, we all picked tomatoes for Campbell's soup. And then when the, all these people came back, there were enough workers. But there weren't any migrant farmworkers, but there were enough workers around so that we didn't have to... I was only eleven years old. The minimum age for a child worker is fourteen, so the laws were forgotten when you needed the food. So it was very interesting to be part of this complex of changing rules.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.