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DH: How'd your father get the name, nickname, Slab Harry?

IN: Well, my dad was an outgoing person and he had a good rapport with the company people and he was in charge of a gang that did, at night they loaded these mosquito boats like the Monticello that went to Seattle every day. And they loaded slab wood on the boats every night so that they could have fuel for the steamer going to Seattle back and forth, and that's how he got his nickname. He was head of the gang and that's how he got the name Slab Harry, and he also worked various places in the mill and...

DH: He's sort of a famous Japanese immigrant, one of the pioneers here on the island to be known as Slab Harry, to actually have a nickname. Because many of Japanese were not really given names at all and most of the Japanese who first came to work for the mill were just given numbers.

IN: Yeah. Well, the payroll records show that the company people could not handle the Japanese names so they had it like Jap 1 and Jap 2 and Jap 3 and so forth to designate the various people. And my dad, for instance, had to keep track of the various people that worked every night and how long they worked, and he had such a memory that he never wrote it down. At the end of the month he turned the time into the office, and all the years he did that he says he only made one mistake. Unfortunately, I was not of the same breed, I guess. [Laughs]

DH: The Slab Harry part was sort of a side industry that he had going outside the lumber business. I mean, he worked at the sawmill and then he also loaded these boats at night as sort of a side, another job.

IN: He worked at various jobs in the mill over the years, and he even worked on the log boom, which is not the safest job in the world. You get on these, in the mill pond and you get on these logs, and you feed them to the mill. And he didn't know how to swim, but that's the way they were. [Laughs]

DH: And I guess we don't have slabs anymore since they use the lumber differently now when they cut them down, but so for history's sake, slab, as I understand it and you can correct me, it's just the uneven parts of the wood?

IN: Yeah. Well, I guess they do that today even, but in the old days the logs were big and to cut them into lumber, they square up the logs, and the parts that are discarded are called slabs. And that's the part the bark is on and the log is squared up so that they can cut lumber off.

DH: So those could be used for fuel, then, on these other vessels.

IN: That is right.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.