<Begin Segment 3>

TI: Okay, before we go there, on this, sort of this second neighborhood you grew up, do you recall who your friends were? I mean, not necessarily names, but I'm just curious if there were very many Japanese there.

YM: There weren't many Japanese there, no. I don't remember who my friends were, but as I recall, it was mainly, maybe kind of a mixed neighborhood with white and maybe some Spanish and so forth.

TI: And so clientele for your dad's stores, the first two stores, did he stock like Japanese food there?

YM: No, no.

TI: So it was more, the first one was maybe more Hispanic or Spanish, Mexican kind of food?

YM: Probably, probably.

TI: Okay, so we're talking about the third one, now he goes to a fruit and vegetable stand?

YM: Yeah, then he opened another store. It wasn't a grocery store, it was a fruit and vegetable store, in another location. And I can't kind of relate where we lived with that store, but eventually we moved to another location, another home. And it was in a mixed neighborhood, and we had neighbors that were blacks, Italians, Greeks, Jews. And then right next door to us was a white family who were contractors. They were road builders, and so they had a big yard in the back where they had these horses. In those days, they didn't have motorized road building equipment, it was all horse-drawn equipment for graders and hauling dirt and so forth. And so I used to, in the backyard, go and look at the horses. They were really mules, not horses. Anyway, they were whites, and I think it was mainly a white neighborhood where the direct neighbors were Jewish, Greeks and so forth.

TI: And so in the neighborhood, were there ever any events where the families would get together and do things together?

YM: No. We more or less socialized with other Japanese. They weren't close by, but we'd meet them at church or we'd visit each other's homes.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.