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DA: But I want to go back to your early life now. You talked a little bit about your being in East L.A. and moving to Montebello, I think, is where we left off. Before we go back there, can you tell us when you were born?

DA: Oh, March 15, 1950, Ides of March. I learned that in high school sometime, I guess.

BN: And then you mentioned, when we talked earlier, that you knew your grandparents as a child, and I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about your memories of your grandparents when you were a child, and obviously they're elderly, just a sense of how you saw them, what they were like.

DA: Well, I guess... well, my mom's side, he was a gardener and lived in Boyle Heights not too far from where we lived. We were in East Lost Angeles on First, and my grandparents were in Boyle Heights on, right off of Fourth Street, not too far from Evergreen Baptist Church. And later when I was maybe about eight or nine years old, I started helping him garden, so I'd go on his gardening routes. So that was in fun, or at least got to know a little bit of Japanese that way, and a very gentle man. I have fond memories of him, and my grandmother was a great cook, and so I'd love to go over there any time and partake in what she'd make. I think my mom got that bug from her, too. My mom was a very good cook, too.

BN: And then you'd mentioned that before the war, they had run a, had a store in Tacoma.

DA: That's right.

BN: Did he have any prior experience as a gardener or is that something he just picked up?

DA: You know, that's a good question, and I'm not sure. It sounds like he just, there's one thing that he found that he could do, and that there was a need. And so he just kind of picked it up.

BN: That's a common story. It was one of the occupations that it was almost advantageous to be Japanese, so a lot of, an enormously large number of Issei and Nisei went into that at that time. You mentioned going with them on some of his gardening route. Where was his clientele?

DA: You know, that's the interesting part, is that a lot of it was in Downey, and a lot of hakujins. And I don't know how he met these people, it must have been through referrals. That's all I can figure out, because like I said, they're all hakujins, none of them spoke Japanese. But my grandfather spoke just enough English, and some of his clientele was pretty impressive. Because later on, my uncle on my mom's side took over his route. He was an engineer, electronic engineer working at RCA. I always thought he was doing fine, but he ended up taking over my grandfather's route, and of course I'm following him around, too, and so I was given more responsibility by my uncle so I was able to do a few things more. And as a consequence, I'd be in other people's yards, backyards, even allowed to go into the house. And one these homes, I remember, my uncle said, "Go mow that backyard." I said, "Okay," and I go back there, and it's maybe a small patch about this big, and I'm done in like five minutes. And I go back and he goes, "What happened?" "Well, I'm finished." He goes, "What do you mean, you're finished? You can't be finished. It's big." And I go, "No, it's small." He goes, "Oh, you didn't go far enough back." And so anyways, it's just huge. I could see why. And the owner of that home was a stuntman, and one of the things he also taught was how to draw a gun. And he was telling me and I got to meet him, how he taught people like John Wayne and some of those old Western guys how to draw a gun. And he took me in the back and showed me his collection of guns. It was incredible. The room was bigger than this room, twice as big as this room, rifles, guns, all over on the walls, and you know, I'm, what, twelve, thirteen years old and looking at all this going, "Wow, this is impressive." And there was a lot of, a fair amount of homes like that, that my grandfather was able to get somehow. So I wish I could have known more about how that all evolved.

BN: Interesting. What you had mentioned about the insurance men and kind of organization and not competing, I think gardeners had a similar sort of arrangement.

DA: Maybe.

BN: So they had their territories. Yeah, no, that's a great story.

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