<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Earlier, you talked about how the town would come alive on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

KM: Yeah, uh-huh.

TI: So who was coming in during that time?

KM: Well, I think, just like everybody else, it was what you could do on the weekends. So they'd all come in to town. Yeah, a lot of the laborers, they worked all weekend, and on Saturdays or Friday night, they'd all come. People from Mendota and a lot of farm country. Lot of Mexican families used to come in there.

TI: And so when that happened, like weekends, did your parents give you any warnings? Were there instructions for you to be careful or anything like that?

KM: No, nothing, no. We didn't get any warning. We weren't afraid of anything.

TI: Because I'm just guessing, based on what you described, I mean, there was probably drinking...

KM: Oh, a lot of drinking, yeah, uh-huh.

TI: And thing like that happening.

KM: Right, uh-huh. Yeah, I remember the Indians coming into town and getting drunk. The police, they were ruthless. They billy-clubbed them and called the wagon and threw 'em in the wagon. Yeah, it was, it was something, something to see, the way they beat the guys up. You do that now, it's a no-no. But back then, everything was open.

TI: And so it was common to see police officers in Chinatown...

KM: Oh, yeah. They're walking around, yeah, drive around in cars.

TI: Well, so if the police were in Chinatown, you talked about earlier the gambling that would happen.

KM: [Laughs] Yeah.

TI: So how did the police deal with the gambling?

KM: The gambling? They got paid off. [Laughs] I've seen cops go into... yeah, a liquor store, and they'd walk out with a box of cigars or two bottles of whiskey or something like that. Or a cigarette, carton of cigarette. Or they'd go to a Chinese restaurant, get coffee and doughnuts free. Ah, they were really paid off.

TI: So within the Fresno, sort of, city, was Chinatown kind of the area for lots of gambling and drinking and things like that, or was it common throughout the city?

KM: Yeah, the drinking was all over the city. They had bars all over. But being in Chinatown, you see all of this stuff going on. And I don't know if they had that ordinance on gambling or not, but evidently they didn't, because it was pretty wide open. Yeah, the guys got runners and they'd come, you'd be sitting in a restaurant and the runner would come and go to the proprietor or waiter or waitress and collect. That wasn't too bad, twenty cents, twenty-five cents, fifty cents, something like that. And then they'll say, "Oh, we're gonna have a drawing at two o'clock in the afternoon." So they come back at two o'clock, and either you'd bet some more, or you get paid off.

TI: And when the betting that's, like ten cents, twenty-five, fifty cents, if they won the numbers, I mean, how much would someone win?

KM: That I don't know. I don't know how much they won. It must have been pretty good because... I didn't play it, so I don't know. Too young to be playing that kind of stuff.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.