<Begin Segment 8>

SY: So he was able to open the stall, so he was by then growing flowers as well.

BW: So by then he, yeah, he was growing flowers on his own. He had his own farm, leased farm. And so this must've been around, late 1930s, I guess, where my mother and my father now had their own farming business.

SY: And the house, they had a house on the farm, then, they lived on?

BW: There must've been a house on the farm that they lived in.

SY: And how soon did they start having kids?

BW: Right away, because my, they were married in '32, my oldest brother was born in '34, and my next oldest brother was born in '36. And then I had another brother born in '38, Takeshi.

SY: And the two older brothers were named...

BW: So my oldest brother is Kinichi, and my next oldest brother was Kinjiro, which is not uncommon, but again, my oldest brother is named Ken to his friends and my second oldest brother is named to Ken to his friends, so it was kind of confusing. [Laughs] I don't know, I guess they just got stuck in... but my third brother was Takeshi.

SY: And he didn't have a nickname?

BW: No. [Laughs]

SY: He wasn't Tak? [Laughs]

BW: Yeah.

SY: And then there was you, and then following you, were there younger siblings?

BW: So after me, I had a younger brother, Yoshimichi. Yeah, so, but then the war broke out in '41, '42, and Takeshi died in camp, so I never met him.

SY: And you tell the story about how he was ill before you went to camp, Takeshi. I mean the story of how he died, is that...

BW: Yeah, it was something that I kind of pieced together over decades because my parents never really talked about it. But what I, well, for a long time my, Takeshi, we went to Manzanar in February of '42 -- he was four -- and then he died around September of '42, so he was in camp for like six months when he died. And growing up I would, every now and then I wondered how did he die, what did he die of, and my parents never gave a complete answer. They would always say, "Well, he was sick and he didn't get well and he died." Or, you know, it was dusty and it was bad conditions, and the food, and so he got weaker and weaker and he died. So I accepted that for many, many years, and then one day -- I think this must have been told to me after my father died, by my mother, so this must've been, like, in the 1990s -- so my mother said one day, she goes, "I've never talked about this, but when Takeshi was maybe about three or four, he had apparently eaten some poison insecticide that we used," that the family would use to spray flowers to keep off the bugs. And so she said, yeah, my father was carrying Takeshi, was rushing, and he said he must've eaten some of the insecticide, 'cause back then kids would just play wherever they want to play. So they rushed him to the hospital, and, but my mother said he was, like, unconscious and limp, and by the time he got to the hospital he had kind of perked up. And then the doctor checked him over and he seemed to be okay. It's kind of odd, where he just went from unconscious to kind of perking up. And then, but my, so my mother didn't think much about that, they were just glad he was okay. Then when they went to camp, as he was getting sicker and sicker, they would take him to the hospital and eventually he was confined to the hospital. So the doctor one day asked my mother, "He's not getting better. He seems to be having, there's something wrong with his heart." And so she said, he asked her, "Did he ever, like, eat poison or anything like that?" So she told him what had happened, but she said, "Well, I don't want you ever to tell" my dad what happened. So it's a secret. She kept it secret. So I presume that was the reason, but I didn't know it 'til fifty years later.

SY: So your older brothers -- and they were how much older than you?

BW: Well, my oldest brother's ten years older, and my second oldest is eight years older.

SY: And as far as you know, they were born before camp, in the, in...

BW: In the San Fernando Valley.

SY: In the San Fernando, on this farm that your parents took over from... was there another place that they lived in between the time they originally moved?

BW: Well, they seem to have had a couple of farms. They had a farm in what was called Shadow Hills, near Sunland. And then there was another farm on, near Laurel Canyon and, and... I forgot the cross street. In Pacoima.

SY: I think it started with an M. That was the, that was the farm that they lived on when they were sent to camp?

BW: No. These were some farms that they had before they moved to Montague Street.

SY: Montague's the one I was thinking of.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.