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DG: And again, I'm gonna kind of back up. So, your father is a young man and he's come to Bainbridge to farm on other Japanese farms. At that time, what other sort of work was he doing, when he first... before he had settled on Bainbridge, I guess.

DR: Well, he was working in the fish canneries up in Alaska. And then he'd come back and, like I said, then he'd come and stay in Seattle and that's how he found out that the Japanese farmers could use workers, and that's where they learned to work and farm the berries over here, from the different farmers. And it's just like, I know that Art Koura was asking if there was any descendants of Thor Madayag, and they live right over here. That's Pinky and Eddie, and the two girls, Gina and... Gina and Anita. 'Cause he said that he, Thor Madayag was his foreman during the war, for the strawberries on his farm. And I know, too, that Chiharas, Garcia Almojuela, he took care of their farm during the war. And so the Chiharas, I know that when he went into the nursing home, he wanted to go and visit him. So, there was... it was there.

DG: And what was your father's life like, when he first got to the United States and was...

DR: There was a lot of prejudice, there really was. They weren't accepted, called "brown monkeys" and whatever else. "Just go back where you belong," and things like that. But there is a lot of nice people, too, so we can't just put it into one camp. But what made my dad decide to come over here and just really farm and farm, is because they worked so hard in Alaska canneries, they could work twenty-four hours a day and just for nothing, you know, and get paid very minimal, minimum wage and stuff where everybody else got paid more. So they wanted to get a union, and they were at a union meeting in Seattle, trying to form a union for the cannery. And my dad and his Filipino friend were walking on the piers and pretty soon all these, this gang appeared. They had flashlights and torches and clubs and they were just chasing, chasing them and hollering at them, so they ran. My dad ran one way and his friend ran the other way. My dad went under the pier on about, I think it was Pier 60, and he was holding onto the posts and he saw the flashlights and lights going on and all the noise. He was in there shivering and pretty soon he, pretty soon it got real quiet so he got out of there and he went looking for his friend and his friend didn't make it. They clubbed him to death on the pier and he died.

DG: That's awful. Now, and when did your father tell you about this?

DR: Well, I was pretty much almost a teenager when he told me that. And I wanted to ask my mom what year was it, what his friend's name was, and Mom says, "You know, this is the first time I've heard this. And you can't just... you know, just respect that."

DG: And so you think that incident had something to do with him coming to Bainbridge?

DR: Oh, it did. It did. He said, "That's it. I'm not going back to Alaska again." So he came over here and that's when they went and leased that land, and farmed. And then during the war, too, they, they worked down at the Hall Brothers shipyard, too. A lot of them got their trade over there. 'Cause, from there my dad went over to -- became an American citizen -- and became a welder over at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and retired there.

DG: So your father had two jobs?

DR: Oh, yeah. He, he loved working swing shift over at the shipyard because he can work on his berries during the day. My mom called him a workaholic. [Laughs] He just loved working on his farm and he said it was just really his way of relaxation, too.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.