Densho Digital Archive - Helen Tanigawa Tsuchiya Interview (denshovh-thelen-01-0019)

<Begin Segment 19>

MA: Well, tell me about meeting your husband. You said your parents, your fathers knew each other from working in the department store.

HT: Yeah. We lived only 10 miles apart in California. I never knew him. We came here and I met him and then he got a job working at my, my brother's place. He was a truck driver and stuff like that. And then yesterday I was talking about -- he kept going and going and he became like an engineer, I mean, he didn't go to college, but he knew more than the people that came from college. Because he learned all that stuff that they were doing at that work that he had. So it was really quite a thing that this fellow that was sitting next to me, he's from Fowler, which was the home town of the Tsuchiyas. They knew each other but he didn't know that -- they were kids. But he said that when he came to Minnesota he worked at a company and then one time Frank went, he was setting up something, putting up... and everybody said, "Who is that?" And they says, "Look at him. He's really strong. You need three men to put that thing up and he's doing it by himself." They said that, "Helen, he's a good worker." I said, "He was. He really worked hard." And it's too bad that he couldn't get a college degree. He wanted to be a schoolteacher. He wanted to be a baseball coach. But the war stopped it, so, but other than that he was, he really worked there for a long time.

MA: And do you remember meeting him for the first time?

HT: Yeah. I met him when I was his older brother got married here. He was a lieutenant and he was at Camp Savage in the army and he met this girl from San Francisco and then you know, well, you're not from California. And they got married here, and then they said that they just wanted to do a service and then I didn't even know both of 'em but then they wanted me to stand up for her. That's how I met him because Frank stood up for his brother and I stood up for her. [Laughs] That's how we met. It makes me laugh because here I'm standing up for this woman I didn't even know her. It's just... but that's how I met him. And then he was coming to see my brother, but pretty soon he started coming to see me. Yeah, he was, he's such a nice, he's really a nice guy.