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JF: When Pearl Harbor happens, they're running that chicken farm. Oh, in the chicken farm, Chiz, my mother, doesn't escape from doing some labor there. So she's in charge of cleaning the eggs, which she hates. [Laughs] It's kind of a dirty job. But in comparison  to having to do what Harvey and Nori had to do, it's kind of a piece of cake. But they're in charge of mucking out the coops, which were old-fashioned colony style coops that they're kind of, the laying coops are arranged on the sides. You have a center aisle up the middle, there's straw all over the place to pick up the droppings, but unlike today's industrialized methods, the hens would be free to lay their eggs wherever they wanted to. So at times they'd reach the upper rafters there and lay there and inevitably you' get pelted by an unexpected egg falling on your head. So that's what Nori and Harvey had to do. Then they had to muck out all the dirty straw and then replace it with fresh straw. So they had five thousand layers, most of them were leghorn, so they were these white hens with red combs, and then they had one coop that was Rhode Island reds, I'm thinking, who laid brown eggs, more desirable. And so there were five rows of these coops. So as long as they did one coop every day, then the rest of the day was free for them. I have a picture of my uncle Nori in his zoot suit because, of course, he had to have his mother sew him some drapes, they called it. And so he's in the zoot suit, and Harvey is in something, just a plain white pressed t-shirt and khakis. They were at Huntington Beach, they spent a lot of time at Huntington Beach during that summer of '41.

BN: Was it your sense that the farm was doing reasonably well?

JF: Yeah, they did really well, I think. I don't know what the numbers were, but I know when they were forced to sell, right after Pearl Harbor, and then Executive Order 9066 is announced in February of '42, they were forced to sell the ranch. And at that time, they only had seven thousand dollars remaining on their mortgage. So they must have been just paying all the proceeds to pay down the principal. So when that happened, they sold it to the feed man, Dean Forrest, or Forrest Dean, yeah, Forrest Dean, that's right. He was their chicken feed man, and he would come with the pickup truck every Saturday and he would swap them the chicken feed, and then he paid them twenty-five bucks for loading up as much chicken manure into the back of his now empty pickup truck bed as possible. And so that was up to Harvey and Nori to do that. And at the time that they had to sell, they struck a deal with Forrest, and I think he asked them, "How much do you owe the bank?" And they told him, "It's about seven thousand," so he offered to clear that loan for them so that they wouldn't have any debt anymore. So that's all they could do, so at least they had that. And then the bank then returned the collateral, which were these now worthless Tokyo Electric bonds. But my grandmother saved those, that stack of Tokyo Electric bonds in the bottom of, the false bottom of, in the embroidered fabric satchel that she'd carry around by hand with her to Santa Anita. Even though they were worthless, my mom told her, "Mom, these things aren't worth anything anymore." I think it meant something to my grandmother because that chicken ranch was their first attempt to run a business, and they did it successfully. And it was their own, it wasn't leased, didn't belong to anybody else but the family. And so it was secured by those bonds, so I think she felt those bonds are going to be a way to secure her future for her family, she just couldn't part with them even though she knew they were worthless. So she made this false bottom in the bottom of this fabric case and carried it with her into camp. Anyway...

BN: You don't still have those?

JF: I had one sample, but we lost it at Orchard Avenue. Don't know where.

BN: That's a great story.

JF: Yeah.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.