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PW: What about for your parents? So I understand they were doing more agricultural work, there were itinerant workers and harvesting, since they didn't have the restaurant, what were they doing in the years, let's say, from 1945 to 1950?

RO: Oh, from there, yes, after we came back and so on. What had happened was that then, after we found that there was another chance to run, open another restaurant and so on, and what had happened was that then the highway that was initially the original highway that came through the town of Selma had moved over a block. And so then there was a row of businesses, and there was this particular building, which was a restaurant, and I can't remember who owned the restaurant. But there was a gas station there that was occupied by another Japanese American man, and we became very good friends, obviously, because that's where I hung out. So then this restaurant was now a place that we started as a second restaurant.

PW: What was the name of the restaurant?

RO: It was the same one, K and K. They just kept the name, yeah.

PW: Do you remember the name of the man that owned the gas station?

RO: Yeah, Mike Iwatsubo. He had a younger brother, but they were both in the army. But anyway, but again, it was one of these places, because there were so few places where young Japanese men could hang out, and so we found that there were people coming there just to the gas station, just hanging out there. And eventually they would come over and just walked next door to where our restaurant was. And because we had pinball machines, that was set in the section of the restaurant, and the young men would come there and play pinball machines and would just hang out there. So it was, again, another place where people would meet, and yet, they were people that that's how I got to know them, otherwise I had no idea what their backgrounds were, other than the fact that that relationship that you have with hanging out and walking over there to the gas station and sitting in the office, I may have washed the windows of cars, I don't know. But it was a place, that was your environment.

PW: And the clientele was mixed whites and some Japanese Americans?

RO: Yeah. In fact, then the next, across the street from us was a lumberyard, and this had been in Selma for a lot of years, and it happened then to be run by the family of a boy who I went to kindergarten with, so we were good friends at that time, had remained friends all this time. And I used to go to the lumberyard to hang out with him as well, the Shawntz.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.