<Begin Segment 33>

DG: Just for fun, let's tell about that story about going to the national convention.

KS: Oh, you mean, oh. We were, the '62 convention was to be held in Salt Lake City and we were quite excited about going. Toru was the chosen the official delegate from Seattle to go to the convention and we all got in our car, and we had been doing quite a bit of camping in those days and so we had a lot of camping gear and just before we got to Ontario the children...

TS: Oregon.

KS: Oh yeah, it was in Oregon. They were hungry and we were driving through a stretch of country road that had, we hadn't seen a restaurant for miles, so I told Toru let's stop, pull over and I've got some food in the ice chest and we've got our camp stove, why don't I fix a bite to eat, because it'll still be another hour or so before we get to Ontario, you know, until we can get to a restaurant. And so he stopped at the side of the road and it was hot, that was part of it. It was just very hot. It must have been 108 degrees at that time. We had got our camp stove out and fixed the food and we were just getting ready to button the whole thing up and pack up and leave. (Then) in order to close the camp stove, I think the pressure had to be released. And so as soon as the pressure was released, some gas spurted out and it was still so hot that it just...

TS: That was a Coleman gas stove.

KS: Yeah, and it just exploded. The whole tank didn't explode, but all the gas fumes burned right in my face and so, I was burned very badly and I know my son who was fifteen years old at that time, he knocked me over and rolled over me to turn the fire off my clothes. And Toru picked up this Coleman stove, he didn't want it to blow up in the back of our car and he threw it off in the sage brush and that burned his hand, because the stove was hot. And he still had to drive. Got me in the car after they put the fire out on me and we went to Ontario and found the hospital. When I got in the hospital and they found I was burned, they called, well, they knew I was Japanese (so) they called a Japanese doctor in Ontario and his name was Dr. Tanaka. He took care of me and gave me a jar of salve and he says, "Don't let anybody put anything else on you. Just put that on there and put clean bandages on and you'll just be fine." And it was hard to believe.

DG: You said that was some kind of home remedy...

KS: It, it was...

DG: That he had put together.

KS: I don't know whether it was home remedy or not. He says he uses it on all his burn victims and he gets quite a few of these out in the country. So he said you use that and you'll just be fine. So I was, and another thing that was amazing, this happened in the evening. So I spent the night in the hospital and the next morning there must have been four or five Ontario Japanese people who came to see me. I didn't know them personally, but when they heard that somebody got burned and was in the hospital, they were there just, just being so friendly and trying to help. And one of them was a young fellow named Joe Saito. He and his wife were going to go down to the Salt Lake convention, and the farm kept him busy so he didn't have time to drive down, so he had bought two plane tickets to go to the convention and he gave me his plane ticket and his wife Nellie took care, April was a baby at that time, so that was the nicest thing that he did for me. He put me on the plane in his place and Nellie took care of April and he drove to Salt Lake with Toru and the other two children. I stayed in Salt Lake with friends, the Kurumadas for two weeks instead of one week. And by that time the dry, warm air, it just, it did wonders. The burns healed and by the time I was ready to go home, they weren't well, but they were tolerable so I could get home.

TS: Well, if I might interject something. Kiyo ended up without any scarring of face or body and we managed to obtain additional supplies of this salve from Dr. Tanaka and had used, have used that that salve for thirty or thirty-five years afterwards. We lost contact with Dr. Tanaka, but I understand he died in and he's succeeded by his son. But that's one side light. And the other is that while I had put my wife, Kiyo, in the hospital, I told her that that would get a motel room and put our kids in the motel and come back to see her. Well by the time I had completed doing that, which probably took forty-five minutes or an hour, I was stunned to find George Iseri of Ontario and my cousin, Yoshikazu Sakahara and Joe Saito there and I asked them, "How in the heck did you find out about us?" It's just ways of getting the news around. [Laughs] But the unfortunate circumstance gave us a chance to renew or get together with people that've remained friends of ours for lifetime. So it was a blessing as well as a misfortune.

DG: So it was kind of a side light on things that you went through in getting to conventions.

KS: Oh yeah.

DG: But the other thing that's so neat is that that's the way the Japanese community operated.

KS: That's right. We were, we were just dumfounded. And none of them even wanted thanks in return. They just, it's just one of the things that they do.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.