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MN: So let's get into your Burbank years. Share with us what part of Burbank your family moved into.

MO: We lived on San Jose Street. We rented a house there, and it was between San Fernando Road and Third Street. If you go there now, there's an Ikea store there that sits right on, they did away with, it was San Jose Street, and they built that mall complex there. So either the Sport Chalet or the Ikea store is sitting right where we lived.

MN: Was Burbank a segregated city?

MO: Yeah. We could not... from San Fernando Road, it was uphill, towards the hills. And no Asians could live above Glenoaks Boulevard, which would have been the equivalent of Fourth Street. And if you were Mexican, you had to live on Front Street, which is, it was right next to the railroad tracks. And I remember I had a friend Ray Carbahal, and they lived there, and they were all little wooden frame houses, and they all faced towards the railroad track. And the street was not paved, and they had no sidewalk. To my recollection, probably, it was the only street that didn't have that. Today the freeway goes through that area. Yeah, I-5 goes right through that area.

MN: And then did Burbank and Glendale, did they not allow African Americans to live there?

MO: I assume so, because there were no African Americans living there. If you lived in Glendale, you had to live, there was a street they called Flower Street where the Hasuikes lived. And so they, it seemed that nearly all of them lived below San Fernando Road. No one lived above San Fernando Road, even in Glendale, except the Toda family. And the Toda family had a little store, a market, yeah, I guess you could call it a market, on Verdugo Road, and I had their grandchildren as students. Kind of weird.

MN: Now your parents are working at the Three Star Produce, but your father is a Washington State graduate, he's probably very bilingual. He didn't, couldn't find jobs that would use his bilingual abilities?

MO: There were no jobs. Jobs... you got to remember, this is the Depression. 1930s, if you had a job, the whole idea was you had to have a job. I don't know if he ever tried to get another job or not. He then became a gardener, and my mom says he became a gardener for the first time, we had adequate money. But we lived right poorly. But we never went hungry, we always had clothes, but they had patches on them. Shoes were, always had sharkskin toes so it wouldn't get holes in the toes, and constantly being resoled. Socks had darning patches in them.

MN: Did you put cardboard in your shoes also?

MO: No, no. We always got new soles, took 'em to the shoe store and they put new soles on them. But we only had one pair of shoes.

MN: But that was common with the people you grew up with, right, the kids?

MO: Oh, yeah. One thing, when you're a kid, you never went barefoot, because being barefoot was a sign of being poor. See, in Hawaii it was different, but on the mainland, you didn't want to be viewed as being poor. We were, but...

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.