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SY: And who, can you talk a little bit about the man that they leased the land from, the, this last farm?

BW: They, he's the most familiar, that is, I'm most familiar with, so it's, I don't know his first name, but his name was Mr. Meichtry. And I don't recall ever actually meeting the guy, but I probably did, I just don't remember. And so he apparently was growing something on his own, boysenberries or something, so he had his own farm, and so there was another piece of property that he owned along Montague Street. And his farm was, I think, facing Terra Bella. No, no, I forgot the next block. So my parents leased that farm, which I'm told was not really good for farming because there were so many rocks. It was a very rocky piece of dirt, but my older brother said for months they did nothing but clear out the rocks, taking truckloads and truckloads. And they bought or rented this huge flatbed, and I remember he was saying it had big airplane tires so it could carry all these heavy rocks. And so day after day after day, they would load this thing with rocks and then haul it off and dump it somewhere. But eventually the, they got it where they could farm on it.

SY: Amazing. And the, I assume at this point it was a, it was pretty much a family business, so your, everybody in the family worked.

BW: Yeah. Well yeah, everyone, including my uncle Tomio, who was there, and several of the other friends, friends from Fukushima who had come to help work on the farm. So there were maybe five men at that time.

SY: And this man who owned the property, did he have a relationship with your parents?

BW: Only that they seemed to have had a good, friendly relationship. And so my father built his home and then the next, another residence, and then the packing shed, and so when the war broke out... actually, my family had thought about moving to Utah or moving away from the coast. They actually bought, I think they bought, like, a trailer to live in, and they were going to just pack up and move eastward. They had heard about other families doing that, but they couldn't quite get everything together until they were no longer allowed to move, so they had bought this trailer so then they ended up having to sell the trailer. But Mr. Meichtry apparently said, "Well, let me buy the houses that you built, and I'll keep the farm and, after the war is over, you come back and I'll sell the houses back to you and you can pick up where you left off." So that, to me, means they had a good relationship, and I understand this Meichtry fellow was quite a man. I mean, my mother said when he died he had the, one of the biggest funerals they'd ever seen.

SY: So in other words, you were allowed to actually own a home even though you were on leased land.

BW: Right, 'cause my father paid for the home and had it built himself.

SY: And you, do you have any idea how much he, Mr. Meichtry paid for the home?

BW: A few thousand dollars. I don't remember, I don't know what the figure is. My brother might know. So my father had money. I don't know what he did with it, but Meichtry paid him for the homes and the packing shed.

SY: And assuming that there was a great deal of trust between your father and this... so this arrangement probably had came after they found out that they didn't, they couldn't move to Utah?

BW: Yeah, so there was a lot of talk going on between my parents and my uncles about what they should do, and a lot of rumors, hearing from other Japanese farmers what's going on. And of course, some of the leaders had gotten picked up by the FBI, hauled away, so there were a lot of, there was a lot of concern and, "What should we do?"

SY: And this is, this is, these are stories that you heard from your mother, about this? Or from your brothers?

BW: My mother and my older brothers, yeah.

SY: Remembering. And did your mother talk about her, what she was going through, what was going through her mind, how she felt about this, this whole notion... in fact, did she talk about her, did they talk about what happened on the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed?

BW: They did a little bit. I think it was on a Sunday, right? And I guess they were working that day, and they said a Japanese friend of theirs who was a salesman -- I think he was like a fertilizer salesman or something -- came by the house. And this fellow happened to be bilingual and told them, "Hey, you better, you better watch out. War has been declared because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor." And of course, my parents are going, "What? What is this?" [Laughs] And then one of the workers that my father had, he was a man named George Ikeda, and this fellow, George Ikeda, he was quite an inventive person, so he -- in fact, I know if George Ikeda had a chance to college, he probably would've been a genius engineer or something, he was so, so inventive. But he had a shortwave radio set, and so that night, when they had heard that there was this bombing, he was able to tune in, and he was listening to, I guess, broadcasts all the way from Japan about what was going on. And so they're all sitting around the radio and trying to hear information, confirm that there is this war going on. And so my mother kind of vividly told me about that one scene where they're all sitting around this shortwave radio set -- I think it was a Ham radio set -- and trying to hear broadcasts all the way from Japan. So that...

SY: So they were concerned enough that they were, everybody was gathered around.

BW: Right, right.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.