Densho Digital Archive - Ernest Uno Interview (denshovh-uernest-01-0010)

<Begin Segment 10>

LD: When you were growing up, you said your father used to travel around with a...

EU: Dry goods. He worked for a dry goods, yeah.

LD: The pesticides.

EU: Oh, yeah, there was that, right.

LD: Traveling with your father, I'd like to talk to you about, a little bit about your father. I know it's going back in time. Thinking back about your father, when you were going around with him, I don't know how old you were when you were traveling with him, ten, twelve? You were quite young.

EU: I was twelve, thirteen, probably I was fourteen at the oldest when we used to go with my dad out to the country from time to time, out to see the farmers, to whom he was trying to sell pesticides and such.

LD: Let's talk about that a little bit. How old you were, you would travel with your father. What do you remember about your father and also about the world out there, that you would do that? What did you notice about your father and about what his life was like? Start with, when you were fourteen.

EU: Oh, boy. Perhaps the thing that maybe I'd like to relate to you, Loni, is how much of a... well-educated my father was, but the fact that he was self-taught, he was a self-made man. We were always so extremely proud of him because he spoke English as good as any Nisei, although he came to this country when he was twenty, came to the United States, and he had to learn English from scratch. He wrote beautifully, and his penmanship was something to behold. So we were always proud of him as such. But more than that, he was interested in animal science, more specifically in entomology, and as a result he became a self-taught entomologist. I even have evidence of his having had a membership card in Southern California, County of Professional Entomologists, he had an honorary membership in that. Because they, although he did not have the college degrees, he was as well learned an entomologist as many of them. But he'd go out to the farm and was able to talk in scientific terms with many of these young Nisei sons of farmers who were doing farmwork, because that's all they had, were able to do. And I used to admire how he would be able to talk in scientific terms with them. He was very good at that. This way, he wasn't trying to fool a bunch of older Issei who may have been illiterate, trying to fool them with maybe a new product, but he was being very up and up with their son because he was able to prove to them in terms that they could understand and would understand, the validity of the claims he made on the product he was trying to sell and get them used.

LD: And you saw that.

EU: Oh, yes.