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TI: So Jun, this next segment, I want to kind of touch upon... so during the war, the national JACL had to relocate, they had to leave San Francisco and relocate someplace else, they chose Salt Lake City. Do you know why they chose Salt Lake City?

JK: I don't really know why, except that Saburo Kido and George Inagaki and his group decided that Salt Lake City -- we had a building here, the Beeson, old Beeson Building, that was, it was kind of an old building, and they were able to relocate the JACL office there. And I think they were able to relocate the Pacific Citizen with Larry Tajiri in the Beeson building. Now, that, I think shortly after the war was over, why, they demolished the building, because it was an old decrepit building to begin with. And they were able to get into that building to establish the JACL office, that is, the national JACL office. And I don't know exactly the reason for why they set up here, they could have gone to Denver. The only other choice was Salt Lake because of the available spaces here.

TI: And so what interaction did you have with national JACL, and once they came here, did you have much to do with them?

JK: With the national?

TI: Yeah, with national. Did you do anything with national?

JK: No, I didn't. I didn't have too much to do with... this is all through '4-, the year '42 and '43. I was tied in with the local JACL to the point where we were doing what we could to, to rehabilitate all those Japanese who had come out, especially fellows like Fred Wada, who established a community, actually, up in Keetley. In fact, he called me one day and he says he wanted me to check on this family where his daughter was being, well, he wanted his daughter to go to school here, and his daughter was twelve or thirteen years old. And he checked out a family in Salt Lake that would take care of her and see that she went to school, because there wasn't any school up at -- well, there was, but then it was in kind of a remote area.

TI: Can you tell that story? It's a pretty amazing story, that Fred Wada, didn't he lease a large piece of property and brought quite a few families to work that. Can you describe that a little bit more?

JK: Well, it was in a canyon, up in the canyon in a town called Keetley. And he established a whole community there for, I think it was about three years that the, that they farmed up there. Right now, all that is under water because they built a reservoir there, and it's completely under water now, but then we, my father had a farm up there, had lettuce, we raised cauliflower and lettuce. And my father knew just about the time that the lettuce would dry up in the valley here, and we didn't have icepacked lettuce coming in from the coast, but it was too expensive. And so he raised the lettuce up in Peoa, Peoa and Keetley are right together there. And so the harvest time for the lettuce up there was just about the time that the dry up time was available here. So when the lettuce was down to twenty-five cents, why, the new lettuce from the canyon would come in and it'd be four dollars. And that's how my father figured out how to make a little extra money by farming up in Keetley.

TI: So is that what the people in Keetley did, they, it was pretty much truck farming that they did?

JK: Yeah, it was what they call truck farming.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.