<Begin Segment 2>

JS: So can you share some memories of growing up in Walnut Grove, like what a typical day was like?

DM: What I did?

JS: Yes.

DM: Well, when you have a small town and then poor, so any kind of games we have is toys made out of cans, or kick the can, they call it, we used to play. Hide and seek. At night, we used to climb up on some of the hotels' stairway and hide. The small town, there's a lot of places you can hide. We used to play that, hide and seek.

JS: So how many people would be playing hide and seek?

DM: Usually about four or five of us. And then we used to, if it was even players, we split out three men or three men, six, they're going to start looking for where they're hiding.

JS: Oh, so you'd play teams? Like one team would hide and the other team would search? Uh-huh. Anything else?

DM: What else did we do? There wasn't much to do. But that little town, the whole town people built a baseball diamond, you know. This one farmer let us use that, so many acres, and so Japanese people built the town baseball diamond.

JS: Do you remember when that was being built?

DM: It was already there when I was...

JS: Okay. Can you describe it a little bit, the baseball diamond? Describe what it looked like.

DM: What's it look like?

JS: Yeah, and what was unique about it.

DM: It was real, it was not a big one, but enough people for the whole town (and more) to... so when the out of town people used to come, they said, "You got a nice baseball diamond." And they used to play for daytime only, then the white people wanted to use it for softball, so they put in the light so they could use it at nighttime.

TI: So it must have been a really nice field.

DM: Yes, that baseball diamond, for the size of the town, I thought that was beautiful, made.

JS: So there were bleacher seatings, and how many people could sit there?

DM: That I don't know, but it's... for a small town it, it had enough room for our whole town to get in there, I guess, so it's pretty big. And as a kid, we used to get paid for going after the ball, so they have two guards on the right and left field, and they tell you where the ball went, outside, and so the people run to get the ball, see. We used to get... I forget how much they pay us, nickel for a ball or something. Then I used to keep score, we used to get twenty-five cents for that, nine innings, there's a big scoreboard on the back (behind center fielder) that you could hang the numbers up every time, the score.

TI: Oh, so it was like those old-fashioned ones where you hang the numbers...

DM: It's a big old block with a number on it, see. So you just hang that up. There's two of us because that sign, if you had a boxful, it's heavy, you know. (Narr. note: At the end of the inning they score five runs, they will ring the bell five times.)

TI: And did you run the scoreboard for both the Japanese games, baseball games, and the Caucasian, the white...

DM: Well, I don't know if Caucasian used it or not, I don't know about that. (No, only Japanese).

JS: So did you, did any of your siblings play on the baseball team? Anyone in your family?

DM: No. We weren't athletic at all.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.