<Begin Segment 13>

[Location: Downtown Clovis, New Mexico.]

AR: All right, Dr. Ebihara, we're in downtown Clovis, and with the backdrop of the Clovis Hotel behind you, we thought this was a good opportunity for you to reflect on some of the memories of being a child in Clovis.

[Interruption]

AR: I know that you spoke about ways that the children made money?

RE: Oh, yes. We were enterprising young people. Sometimes we sold things, or tried to sell things that people said, "Oh, no, we don't want those," they were tarantulas or rattlers, rattlesnake or cactus in an old Campbell's soup container. But one of the things --

AR: Who were your customers? Who were your customers?

RE: Well, they were people who have a brief stop on the Pullman, the train would come twice a day, ten-thirty in the morning or eleven, and then at three-thirty in the afternoon. And us kids knew just when the Pullman would arrive so that we could beg for some money or whatever. But Hotel Clovis was the only hotel in Clovis at that time when we were growing up, and so we knew that some people would get off and stay at Hotel Clovis probably overnight, because the trip from the west going east would be a long ride or going the other way. So we would take our wagon and wait at the train station, at the depot, and then when people would say, "Well, where do we get a taxi?" Well, there were no taxis but we would say we can haul your luggage over there and they would, they would go with us and we would make five cents to ten cents. That was a lot of money for us kids at that time.

AR: What did you do with the money that you earned? What did you do with the money you earned?

RE: Oh, we would go to the local grocery store and buy little candies, you know, whatever, it was always about a penny or two cents for candies, but that's what we used the money for. But we were enterprising enough to do that. There were times we had no customers and there were times we had more than the wagon would hold with luggage. So it was great time.

AR: Did you have to contribute at all to the family income? Did the kids...

RE: No, when we were kids not really until later years when we were teenagers.

[Interruption]

AR: So we're standing in front of the Lyceum Theater. Do you know... people of your generation, the movie house was always a very big thing in their life. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of movies you liked to go see and what kind they showed here?

RE: Big thing. I guess we were always used to entertaining movies like musicals, and that was always left us with lasting impression about life, how it was always bigger than Clovis obviously. You know, there was always interesting that, could there be life like that, so glamorous and so beautiful? But going to movies took us out of that ghetto existence, took us into another world, but we enjoyed that very much.

AR: Got out of your little camp environment?

RE: Lyceum, Lyceum theater in the background is probably one of the few lasting remnants of the old Clovis that we know of, you know. And of course if you look at the cobblestone streets that's here, it's what's left of the cobblestone but there... Clovis was, always had a celebration called the Pioneer Days. And so there would be parades and the Japanese community was involved in that with a little float depicting girls in kimonos with false cherry trees, and they would have parasols and people were always impressed with that beauty of the Japanese costumes and the pretty young ladies wearing those kimonos. So we were part of that celebration, Pioneer Days, yeah.

AR: I wonder if any residents ever took any photographs of that? That would be...

RE: A few, I would imagine, yeah, sure.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2008 New Mexico JACL and Densho. All Rights Reserved.