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BN: Just to back up a little with your dad's side, he doesn't leave 'til like, this is...

JF: Very late.

BN: Fairly late. Do you know if there was... and the whole, basically his whole family stayed in camp.

JF: Yes, until the very last day.

BN: Yeah. So do you know what the story is there, or if they considered going out earlier? Because demographically, your dad's someone who you would think would have left early.

JF: I don't think they had anything going. They had sold their business, I don't know the details of that sale. I don't know why they never considered Chicago. But know once my parents were married for their honeymoon, they went back to Heart Mountain to, well, for Chiz to be introduced to the family and to find out what their plans were. Because this is, they were married October 14, 1945. And I only know that date because it's my wife's birthday. [Laughs] Anyway, so they're back at Heart Mountain, and it's, like, deserted by now.

BN: They were one of the last to leave.

JF: Yeah. So I don't know why they never left sooner, but both, I think Nellie and Rose were still there, Togo's still, I'm not... maybe Togo left. Yeah, I'm not sure. Anyway, I know the parents are still there, they're very impressed meeting my mom, and they can't believe Jack's good fortune, their son's good fortune in finding this proper young lady. And she defers all their compliments and stuff they way you're supposed to. [Laughs] But my mom said that on their way back, it reminded her of leaving camp, watching, this time they're in a car, but still, just watching camp recede in the background. It just reminded her of her whole experience.

Anyway, Jack's parents, my grandfather and grandmother on my dad's side, they wound up going back to L.A. from camp with just the fifty bucks between them. They resurrect Parkview Cleaners at the corner of Alvarado and Hoover. It's an intersection that, I think, today it's still there. It kind of splits, and they were right there at that split. But back then it was a real quiet neighborhood. My grandmother contracts tuberculosis, she's unable to work, she succumbs later, kind of quickly. So my grandfather asks Jack and Chiz if they could help out in the cleaner's. That's how they wind up leaving from Chicago to come back to L.A. And that's in early 1948, because that's when my sister was born. And I have a picture of my mom, obviously very pregnant, behind the counter at the Parkview Dry Cleaners with my dad and grandfather on either side of her. So that's where I was born. And when you lived in the back of the cleaners, my mom said she was in charge of pressing, running this commercial press, big machine, and saw the steam shooting out. And she had to meet the customers at the front desk because my dad had a job at the post office. So he was a mail sorter, so in those cases she had to manually slot the mail.

BN: At that time, wasn't that fairly unusual for a Nisei to have a federal...

JF: Yeah, postwar in L.A.

BN: Did he ever talk about how that came about?

JF: No. Must have been through my uncle Togo, his older brother, because my uncle Togo was with the post office, too, and he stayed with them for decades.

BN: A lot of Nisei prized those federal jobs, but there were, not many were able to get them until later, of course. But this very early postwar period, interesting.

JF: Yeah, maybe my dad's UCLA impressed somebody.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.