Densho Digital Archive - George Hiromoto Interview (denshovh-hgeorge

<Begin Segment 2>

DG: And what year were you born?

GH: 1921.

DG: And what were your parents growing when you were a child?

GH: Farming?

DG: Yeah.

GH: Oh, when they came here, my dad, my grandfather was farming already. He was growing mostly beans, dry beans. You know how the dry beans are, pink beans. They used to grow a lot of that. And then when my father got in with them, they started growing asparagus and beans.

DG: And where was their property?

GH: Here in Clarksburg.

DG: In Clarksburg?

GH: Yeah.

DG: Did they lease the property?

GH: Yeah, most of them were leased ground.

DG: Do you know who they leased from?

GH: Yeah, Hollenbeck.

DG: Hollen...

GH: Beck, B-E-C-K.

DG: That was a person's name or a company?

GH: Yeah, that's a person's family name.

DG: How many acres were they farming?

GH: Oh, gee, they were farming, they were farming close to a thousand acres anyway. But they leased the other grounds, too, but my dad was farming more.

DG: Before the war?

GH: Yeah, this was before the war.

DG: That's big.

GH: Well... he increased it little by little. Well, they started off about twenty-five, fifty acres, and then they grew up to, increased to a thousand acres.

DG: And it was mostly dry beans and asparagus?

GH: Dry beans and asparagus. You know how asparagus is?

DG: Do you want to describe it? Did you help in the fields?

GH: Yeah. After asparagus, we started cutting asparagus, then we had what you call green asparagus, we pack it, see. So we used to have a packing shed where we hired 'em in to pack the asparagus. He'd bunch it and then he'd put it in crates, and that's how we used to grow asparagus. And then later on, out of same asparagus, later on we got into white asparagus. We'd lift the row, lifted up the ground, dirt, and then you start, before it comes up to be green, it'd grow white. Just about as it's coming out of the ground, we used to have a Hindu, oh, yeah, we used to hire Hindu and Arabian. [Laughs] During those times, can you believe that, there weren't that many Mexican families. So it was Filipino, but mostly Hindu and Filipino.

DG: When it was harvest season.

GH: Yeah, harvest season. Well, between times, too, we used to hire some of them to help on the ground, preparing the ground and things like that.

DG: Not other Japanese Americans?

GH: No, not at that time.

DG: So this is in the 1930s.

GH: Twenties and '30s, yes.

DG: And were those Hindu and Arab people, where would they live in?

GH: Oh, we had a camp for them in the range. And, you know, we had a camp so they could stay in a camp so they could stay with us all the time.

DG: Was it just men?

GH: Men, all men.

JS: So would your mother cook for them?

GH: No. They used to have men cooking for them. My mother just took care of our family.