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BN: So anyway, your family and some of your extended family then go to Utah.

RM: Yeah. We went to Spanish Fork... well, you want me to get to Fred Wada now? [Laughs] My uncle Hachio, the one that was farming up there in Mendocino County, knew Fred because, through the produce market. Fred was involved with the market here in Los Angeles, and my uncle was up in the San Francisco area. But they somehow knew each other. So when Fred took a bunch of San Francisco people up to, was it Utah or Colorado? Utah, I guess it was. Yeah, Utah, no, around Salt Lake, Ogden area, he took them up there to farm. He needed farming equipment, so he asked my uncle for farming equipment. Because if you're going to leave anyway, you don't need it. And so my uncle sent him the farming equipment. And then in the meantime, most of the people who had gone up with Fred decided they didn't want to farm, so they went to Salt Lake City or Ogden and found another type of job. And so Fred needed workers, so he asked my uncle if we could come over there and help farm. And so my uncle went out there to take a look at the land, and when he saw the land, he said, "No, this not that conducive for farming," so he declined. But while he was there, he looked for other places that we might go to. So he found this place in Spanish Fork, Utah, that needed workers, so he contracted for us to go.

BN: Where was Spanish Fork?

RM: Spanish Fork is below Provo, below Provo, a short way below Provo. So we went there, I was in the sixth grade, finished my sixth grade there, I guess. And we finished a contract. I don't know exactly what they did, I never saw what they did. But we lived in... it must have been two houses there, I don't know if we had two houses, because I think Hachio, Nancy and his family, they lived in a separate house than we did. We had a whole house with, you know, three or four families, so we had only one room. And I know my older cousins, like Haluto and Tosh and Eddie, who was Kinjiro's adopted son, actually, because he was actually my Morimotos, Mitsuyoshi, the one that was in Japan, well, he married the Tsuji, one of the sisters, the older sister of Tsuji. And when he died, she remarried. She married into the Moriguchis, they were adopted by the Moriguchi, Kinjiro, the oldest brother, second oldest brother. And they were never told that they were adopted, or that they were a Moriguchi, that they were a Morimoto, until she was going to pass away. Before she passed away, finally told them. But Jack or Eddie, I can't remember which one, one of them suspected that they were adopted because when they went in the army, they had a blood test, and they didn't match their mother, or something was different about the blood test. But they didn't say anything, but the mother, before she died, she told them the truth. So the mother never told the kids who their father really was, and they didn't want anybody else to tell them. So all his pictures were hidden, and so when they finally found out, when she died, I found the pictures that my mother had of him, a very handsome guy, he was a very handsome guy, my Morimoto grandfather's son. And so I gave it to them so that they'll have an idea of who their real father was. But they were still, grew up as a Moriguchi.

But we all lived in one room, and the older kids, they lived in the attic because there was no room. So the older lived in the attic and the other families lived in one room. So it was very crowded. But we did that just for the summer, and then the Tsuji, Koki's younger brother, was farming in Springfield, which is near Provo. And they needed some workers to pick raspberries, pick cherries, and so my cousin Eddie, Jack, Haluto, who else? And my father was going to go to work. Well, I wanted to go, too, I'm eleven years old, I wanted to go. So I cried and cried and cried, said, "I want to go, too. My cousins are going and they're only a year older than I am." So they finally let me go since my father was going to go. And we picked raspberries, and we picked by the pound or the basket, I don't remember, but I did better than my cousins. And then we picked cherries and you had to carry the ladder. Well, the ladders are heavy for an eleven year old kid, right? My father had to help me carry the ladder from place to place to pick the cherries. But I picked a lot of cherries, and I guess I did okay. Because when we thinned the peaches, my uncle paid me adult wages, something like eighty-five cents an hour, that was adult wages. And he paid me adult wages, and doing, thinning peaches. And my father, of course, had to wash my clothes and all that. And I was quite proud of making some money, and went home and gave the money to my mom, it was a nice experience. So that was Spanish Fork. I didn't face any discrimination. Now, Nancy says they did, but I didn't feel any discrimination.

BN: Even in school?

RM: In school. In fact, we had a dance in sixth grade. In fact, before that, I had a crush on a girl in Spanish Fork. Her name was Carol Crump. And we didn't have desks, we had a table, and like four people sat on the table. And I wanted to give her a candy, but I had to give everybody on the table a candy, you know. [Laughs] Oh, my goodness. So anyway, I did something like that. And then we had a dance, so Jack was a year older than me, but we bought a bicycle, a Victory bike. You know, Victory bike, very plain and thin tires so that you could feel every bump. But anyway, we drove the bicycle to the dance, guess it must have been during the day. And the girls, I was very shy, you know, I wouldn't go ask the girls for a dance. So a girl came and asked me for a dance. [Laughs] So I didn't face any discrimination. So then we moved to American Fork for the next year, and we farmed. And we lived way out in the boondocks. You know, the paved road came only a mile, a mile and a half away, and that's where the school bus comes, they don't come to the dirt road. So I had to ride the bicycle to the paved road, and there was a farmhouse, so I leave my bicycle there. And I had to carry my brother on the bicycle to the bus stop.

Now, wintertime, snow, ice, cold, my father would take us sometime on, we had an old panel truck, but lot of times it wouldn't start. He had to crank it in the front to try to get it to crank to start it, a lot of times it wouldn't start, it was so cold. And then we didn't have any electricity out in the boondocks. We had a kerosene lamp, and so if it gets dark, you can't study. And my father made a furo, a bathhouse, and he made a galvanized tank, and then he put that in there, and I don't know what else was in there. He carried that galvanized tank all the way to San Francisco after the war, and he had it in his backyard. But we had a chicken coop, so we had chickens, eggs. I don't know if we had indoor water, because we had to have water running outside all the time. Because wintertime, if you shut it off, it would freeze and you won't have water. So it was running all the time, so icicles, big ice sculptures where the water flowed.

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