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BY: Okay, so he was in Chicago and then he eventually went back to Watsonville. Do you know when that was or why that happened?

SS: He did not go back directly. Because after the war, the family split. So my uncle, my youngest uncle, Uncle Heek, the one who had fought with the 442, and my grandfather and grandmother, went back to Watsonville to restart the farm. But Uncle Mack, my older uncle and dad, went to Brogan, Oregon, to work on a farm that a guy named Tony Tomisello had bought some land up there. And he had taken care of the farm in Watsonville during the war and had bought this land in Oregon, so he asked some of the Japanese that he had helped if they would go farm the land up there. So Uncle Mack and Dad went there. They never said this, but I suspect that they split it that way because Uncle Heek did not have any kids at that point. So he and Grandma and Grandpa, and he got married to Aunt Chick, they went back to Watsonville. And the two with kids, Dad with my brother David and Uncle Mack¸ with Esther, who was the same age as Dave, and then Lawrence, who was born in camp, went to Brogan. And I think it's because they weren't sure it would be safe to go back to Watsonville, because Watsonville had a history of anti-Asian violence. Like there were riots in the '30s against Filipino workers and they had killed, shot and killed one or two Filipino workers back then. And then there was pretty strong anti-Japanese sentiment leading up to the removal and incarceration. So they weren't sure what it would be like.

BY: What about your aunts? Your aunts...

SS: Yeah...

BY: So did they go back to, did they go to Brogan or did they go to Watsonville?

SS: So Aunt Chick went with Uncle Heek back to Watsonville, and Aunt Hiroko and Mary, Dad's first wife, went to Brogan.

BY: Okay, I got you. All right, so he's living in Brogan with a wife and a child, and tell me, I know that something happened there, so can you talk about that a little bit?

SS: Yeah. So they'd been in Brogan for a few years. Mary, Dad's first wife, got pregnant, and the closest hospital was in Ontario, Oregon, which was a thirty or forty minute drive away. And she was in the hospital there and died during childbirth, so both the baby and the mother were lost. One of my uncles told me that there were some suspicions that the doctor on call that night that she died had come in drunk, and there was also some wonderings about if there was some racism involved, like being a Japanese woman wasn't seen as important.

BY: So when did your father and his son David return to Watsonville then?

SS: So, let's see, Mary must have died in maybe '48, I think. And then Dad married my mother, Niki or Yoneko Okano in 1950. My uncle Sadao on Mom's side of the family was a Methodist minister and had been assigned to the Ontario church. So he knew all the Japanese in the surrounding area. And I think Dad had probably been going to that church since he was a Christian. So they knew Dad's situation and had a young son, recently widowed. And my mom was living in Shelton, Washington, at the time, and was unmarried, so they arranged for her to come down and meet Dad, kind of acting like baishakunin, the go-between, arranger. So they met, Dad asked her to marry him, she said, "Only if David approves." So she had to meet David, and see how it would work out. Turns out they hit it off really well, Dave really liked her.

BY: So he must have been around ten or so at the time?

SS: He was about ten years old, ten or eleven when they met.

BY: And so when did they go back to Watsonville?

SS: So we moved back to Watsonville in 1955. So I was born in Brogan in '53, my sister was born in '51, and in '55 we moved back to Watsonville. It was late in '55 because we stayed at my aunt Janet's house. By then, Uncle Sadao had been moved to Florin near Sacramento, at a church there. And we stayed with them for a month or two while Dad went to look for housing in Watsonville. So I had my second birthday in Florin.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.