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BN: Are you still doing photography at this point?

JF: I gave all my black and white equipment to my son, my youngest boy, Daniel, who has kind of done that.

BN: And then while you're involved at Gidra?

JF: Oh, at Gidra? Yeah, I'm still doing black and white photography there. They had a darkroom, a real darkroom that was in one of the... I think the office that we used for the Gidra office on Jefferson right behind Koby's Pharmacy was a former dentist's office, so it had been segmented up into little rooms. And one of the little rooms, Mike Murase converted into a darkroom. And it was pretty cool because once you flipped on the light switch, it would convert, I mean, it would have the red light on that you're supposed to use when you're working in the darkroom. And then on the outside in the hallway, a red light would come on that would indicate somebody's in there, so don't open the door by accident and ruin everything. [Laughs] So that was kind of neat. I spent a lot of time in there and in front of the typesetting machine. We used to have a little waxing machine, I remember, that once you finished typesetting the article and you've got columns, and you'd snip the columns physically with scissors and then run it through a little, this waxer that would stripe the bottom of the paper with lines of hot wax, a layer of hot wax. And then you quickly lay it down where you want it to be on the press ready piece of newsprint or whatever it was that we were working on. Same with the photographs, have to have a photograph. I think you had to label to the printer which photograph went in what space. I can't remember that detail, but I think it was separate from where there articles were, you had to hand in the photographs separately, so each one had to be matched up with the space that it was supposed to fit inside of.

BN: And then once you did that, then you would take it to a printer?

JF: Yes.

BN: Do you remember who did the printing?

JF: No. [Laughs] I think somebody else always did that part.

BN: And then from there, did you as a group do the distribution also?

JF: Yeah. Once the paper was returned to us in bundles, I think our print run was about five thousand, so we would, the first thing we would do is send it out to all of our subscribers with gum labels, who knows how many of those fell off in transit? But those would be sent out to our subscribers, and then the leftovers we would refer back to that calendar and say, okay, we're going to hit this event, this event, this event. And then we would have Friends of Gidra or whoever come in and they'd take a stack and they would just be at the event, talk to people who looked like they knew how to read. [Laughs] And might be interested in picking up and taking a peek at this newspaper, so that's what we did.

BN: Then how did the financial side work? I mean, where is the money coming to print and...

JF: That's a mystery.

BN: And then I assume none of you are getting paid, right?

JF: Oh, no. In fact, we didn't ask about that. Compensation was never a thought to any of us. In fact, how the money came to pay the printer, I don't even remember. Probably came from Mike Murase's checkbook. I have no idea.

BN: I mean, subscribers were paying...

JF: Two dollars and fifty cents for a year. Yeah, the money side I have absolutely no knowledge of. [Laughs]

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.