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MN: Let me ask about your mother now. What kind of work was she doing?

KM: Well, eventually she was doing laundry at home. So they used to, I guess, at first, customers used to bring this laundry over and she used to do all the washing and ironing, and later on, when I was a teenager, I remember I used to drive around and pick up laundry for her.

MN: So when you became a teenager, you helped your mother in that way, but when you were younger, did you have to help your mother?

KM: I helped my mother and dad. He used to take me when he was gardening, some of the heavy work, he'd assign that to me. But mostly I guess I used to help my mother more than my dad, 'cause he used to have a helper, Mexican helper. I didn't have to do as much legwork for him as my mother.

MN: Now you said you did all the heavy work for your father. What's considered heavy work?

KM: Well, like pushing a lawnmower. At that time, we didn't have any mechanized lawnmowers, it was all pushing that Pennsylvania lawnmower to cut the grass, so that was pretty tedious work, tough.

MN: Now, I imagine you had to go to school also. So when did you help your father?

KM: Oh, after school and on Saturdays.

MN: And then when did you help your mother?

KM: Oh, I used to help her in the afternoon after school and at nights, especially like ironing. I was very proficient in ironing shirts. I know I taught a lot of Nisei newlyweds how to iron their husbands' long sleeve white shirts, because back East, you had to wear a tie and jacket to work all the time.

MN: This was, you're talking about later during the war years, you were teaching the Nisei girls how to iron?

KM: See, they never had to do that as much as... because the mother used to do probably all the ironing in the house. The girls were really sort of spoiled.

MN: Now before the war, when your mother was doing this laundry business, did she have to wash everything on those washboards?

KM: Yeah. But about that time she started, one of the early ones to get the washing machine to do that because of the volume of laundry that she had to do.

MN: Now, what did a washing machine before the war look like?

KM: [Laughs] What do you mean?

MN: It doesn't look like what we know today, right?

KM: Oh, I mean, it wasn't... I remember the washing machine in those days, I think it didn't have the dryer or the tumbler-type of thing. It sort of mixed the soap up against the something or other and rotated it a little bit in the washing machine to clean it. I remember it was a very simple type of mechanism compared to today's laundry machines.

MN: Did it take a lot of time? I mean, now you just push a button and you walk away.

KM: That's right. Oh, yeah, I mean, it took a lot of time. Then after, then maybe most of it was using the soap and sort of mixing that with the clothes there, get it clean and then all the drying was done on the outside on the laundry, clothesline, we used to have a wire clothesline in the backyard that was probably about, oh, maybe ten rows of wires so that we can hang the clothes to dry. Especially like sheets and stuff like that, they're pretty big.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.