Densho Digital Archive - Rick Sato Interview (denshovh-srick-01-0017)

<Begin Segment 17>

AI: What kind of changes have you seen in the valley in the last twenty, twenty-five years?

RS: Well one thing I notice most in the valley is that there's -- they don't have too many truck garden farms anymore. It's all orchard or mostly orchard. There's a few people that's farming big, but they don't raise truck garden too much. You know something like corn or something that's all mechanized. So that's, that's, that's the biggest change, plus there's a lot of these smaller towns got the transient labors now. So there isn't too many families around there that settled there, it's all transient workers.

AI: So, so then also you remarried. When was that?

RS: I remarried, well I've been divorced three times. [Laughs] So, I got married again over there in 19, oh, '58 and then, I went to school after that, and then of course I got divorced again, so I had three kids, and that's the reason I had to quit college. Because I couldn't, I couldn't pay support and go to college at the same time.

AI: Now your kids are grown up now.

RS: Yeah, my kids are all grown up. And I got seven grandkids.

AI: It looks like that makes you happy.

RS: Yeah, that -- they're okay. [Laughs] Especially if I don't have to babysit for them all the time, I'd -- I just say, "Hey, you have to go home now. Your mommy's coming home." [Laughs]

AI: Well now, did any of your kids or any of your grandkids ever consider farming do you know?

RS: No, my grandkids like that -- no I don't think they'll ever farm. And it's, it's a big deal now, it could cost you $150,000 to get started, because of these big equipment that cost $100,000 just to buy one tractor. So I don't think that, they're not interested in that type of thing. You know, they all go to college and they're not going to do that kind of work. Like the Niseis, most of them done that kind of work, just, they had to because they -- very few had education to get any type of job.

AI: So now that the kids and the grandkids have different choices.

RS: Yeah, because they all, like I said, they all got college and why should they go to farm? Of course, that's -- farming is an independent life, because then nobody tells you what to do. And that's one good thing about farming, because here if you work for a company or whatever, you always got a boss telling you what to do.