<Begin Segment 17>

SY: And your, and your father ended up doing what when he came back? Where was he when he came back?

BW: I don't exactly know where he lived or stayed. According to my older brother, he came back with a friend and they were able to find a place to live, but not a place where the family could live. And so somewhere, maybe around, at the end of '45, beginning of '46, they, in order to find a place to live they came up with this kind of ingenious plan. My uncle and my father heard that the Red Line was selling some of their trolleys at auction, so my father -- of course, my father did have money from the sale of the house, I presume, so they bought two trolleys and somehow got them delivered to a place in Sun Valley, and so they stripped the trolley cars of the seats and then put in beds and a makeshift kitchen. And then I guess there was an outhouse, so they had no real bathroom except for the outhouse, which wasn't even an outhouse. As I recall -- no, it was an outhouse, but they had no bathroom, a bath. So they took baths at night when no one could see, in the back. [Laughs] So according to my brother, that, they had a tub, but they would only take a bath at night when it's dark. But so they lived there for, apparently, like close to a year, and the health department essentially found that they're living in a trolley and said, "You can't live here," and they kicked 'em out. But I think the timing of it turned out where they were finally able to move back into the Meichtry homes that they had. Mr. Meichtry had rented it out to another family during the war, and again, you can't just kick somebody out, so it took a while to get that family out so that my parents and the family could move back in. But I think the timing of it all kind of worked out.

SY: And this idea of this trolley, was that completely original? No one else was doing anything like that?

BW: I never heard of anybody else doing something like that. I sure wish I had a picture.

SY: The, because the, where they parked it, was that, do you know exactly where that was?

BW: My brothers probably know, but they said it was somewhere in Sun Valley. We did have a farm in Sun Valley at one time, so it could've been near where that Sun Valley farm was.

SY: Was, were there trailer parks in Sun Valley, do you know?

BW: There was a trailer park in Sun Valley right on, I think it was Glenoaks Boulevard.

SY: And Japanese were, resettled there?

BW: Yeah, they, the Sun Valley Japanese Community Center is still there, and the trailer park was located about a block away from where the community center is now.

SY: So the, there was a, I guess a constant Japanese community in that area that sort of came back to the same place after the war, then?

BW: Right. I don't know how big the trailer park was, but there might have been as many as a hundred trailers, I guess. So it was quite a concentration of Japanese families, and so they had a Japanese school there, and I went to that Japanese school for a while.

SY: And the farm that they eventually went back to, that, was that close to Sun Valley, in the proximity?

BW: It's maybe about two or three miles away.

SY: So it was very close. So the Japanese farmers who farmed in that area, which is, I guess, considered San Fernando Valley?

BW: Uh-huh.

SY: They chose, do you know why, I mean, was it because there were so many Japanese that were there, or why they chose that particular area to farm?

BW: Well, there were kind of pockets of Japanese farmers throughout southern California, like the West Side and South Bay and Long Beach. So the San Fernando Valley was one part where there were, I don't know, maybe a few hundred Japanese families all farming in the Valley, flowers as well as produce and things like that.

SY: Was it amenable to farming, that area?

BW: It was. The Valley back then was a lot of citrus groves and horse ranches and farms.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.