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BN: But she goes to Manzanar and your mom goes to...
JF: Jerome.
BN: Jerome.
JF: Yes. So they work that farm, and the two boys, there's this famous story of how, depending on who told it, my uncle Nori was driving the tractor, or my, I suspect it was Uncle Harvey driving the tractor back to this little shed where they kept it. And the tractor is one of these little kerosene power steel wheeled contraptions that, very unstable, especially if you have two people on the top of it, it makes it really unstable. And so Harvey, I suspect, was driving back to the barn with Nori holding his shoulders behind him, and the tractor veers off into one of these irrigation ditches. So it starts to topple, Harvey jumps out and Nori says he saves Harvey that day from being crushed by the tumbling tractor. But sometimes I wonder if it was the other way around. [Laughs] They were so close in age and they were always together, the two of them. And Nori was always Harvey's protector. They couldn't be more opposite in personality. Because of his responsibilities as the English-speaking male and oldest male on the farm, Nori was the one who dealt with the dealers and the wholesalers who would come to buy whatever the family could sell. And so you couldn't pull anything over Nori, he was really sharp with numbers. And then Harvey would always be in the background, but he would be kind of the manual labor. Once the deal was agreed to, then the crates had to be loaded up onto a truck, and that's where Harvey would come in and be doing all the heavy lifting. So both of them got into weightlifting, but Harvey was just more of a natural athlete, I think. Although Nori was pretty gifted himself, and wound up becoming a golden gloves boxer, crazy things.
BN: Did they do any competitive weightlifting?
JF: They did in camp.
BN: Okay. That actually was this odd Nisei niche. There were a bunch of Nisei weightlifters.
JF: Exactly, exactly. And Harvey was kind of a star because he was so young, yet he could lift so much. He was lifting 250 pounds fourteen times as a fourteen-year-old. So kind of incredible. Anyway, so they leave the farm because an opportunity comes up where my grandfather's good friend is going back to Japan. So this is 1940, '41? I think end of 1940.
<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.