<Begin Segment 14>

WH: We saw those long lines of people waiting for, for hard-to-get dry goods at your store. I was wondering what kinds of things did they want so much that were so hard to get?

DT: Oh, basic items. Underwear and clothing. It was a dry goods, dry goods operation, you see. So men would want Jockey shorts and socks and...

WH: And those things were in short supply, huh?

DT: Huh?

WH: Those things were in short supply?

DT: Oh, short supply. You had to beg, borrow and steal to get some of those things in those days. You can't realize it now, but wartime shortage, you see. And so for me to go out and try to buy, buy things, and now if I was a big firm out here that they knew, they did their business with all the time, that's nothing. But here we were just out in the desert. After the war, we're not going to be there. Why should they want to sell us merchandise when they can hardly supply their regular customers? And we had to go there, bow our heads and tell them we're behind the barbed wire, Japanese Americans, and then tell them the sad story of evacuation, and that we had a store in San Francisco, we had to close it down because of the war. We're living in a barrack behind the barbed wire in the desert of Utah. And then they start feeling sorry for you. You work on their sympathy. "Well, if that's the case, we'll give you a bolt of this material," and that's how we got started. And on our third trip, we bought fifty thousand dollars worth of goods, which was a lot of money in those days. And oh, we ran. We ran all over Chicago, ran to St. Louis and Denver, Kansas City, to get that merchandise.

WH: How much did you earn as general manager of the co-op?

DT: Nineteen dollars.

WH: And how much was color 8-mm film?

DT: Gee, I don't remember now. [Laughs] I really don't remember now, but it wasn't cheap. But we're lucky to get it, even. Now, you can't get it. And then I was lucky that I was able to get color. Black and white you could look at but it doesn't look good. Regular black and white movies. But color, oh, it stands out, you see. You saw the, you saw my Topaz movie? Yeah. I was lucky. Lot, lot of it is, should have never happened. The man getting my camera for me, that's unheard of. He's a government man; it's against the law, he gets it for me. But you see, human relationship. And they like you, they want to help you out. All kinds of experiences.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2005 Densho and The Japanese American Film Preservation Project. All Rights Reserved.