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MA: So I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about the farm in Parlier. Did you work on the farm after school?

HT: Yes, we picked, actually my sister and I were cooks. We made the supper and then the bath water we had to carry it, you had to pump it and carry it all the way and we put it in and then burn it underneath and we used to cook the rice outside. And we were that way, but then when the grape season came, we picked grapes and then put it in the tray. There was Thompson grapes and we made it into raisins. And I don't know how we ever did it. They put it in trays and the sun would brown it, then we would get two trays and turn it over and then get the other side to brown it. And my father would, we had sweat boxes of raisins, and he used to carry those. I cannot believe how strong they were. And we had horses, one horses and a mule. And then he would take it out in the farm and then he would disconnect them and, "bang" like that and they would walk back to the barn. And then we used to ride at home once and a while. But everything, we had no running water. We had to pump everything. So in those days it was pretty, pretty sad.

MA: And what about your house? What did your house look like?

HT: Our house was, we had pump and everything, we had ice cubes to make, it was non refrigerator, we had those old style... we had a little kitchen and then we had a bedroom and we called it a parlor, but then we were all sleeping in the floors like that. That's all. And we had one dog that was supposed to take care of the farm when we were out in the farm. That's about it. It was a small place.

MA: And how large was your farm and...

HT: 40 acres. The last one was 40 acres. And we wanted to buy it, but he couldn't buy it so he rented it. And then there was a, I think, my brother was in college. He didn't want to be a farmer. He wanted to go to school. So then, I don't know how they even paid his tuition. In those days it was cheap, I'm sure. He went to Fresno State College and he graduated from that and he was in business. And then he became twenty-one and he was able to buy the farm in his name. And so we just bought it, and then, making payments and all that, and then this happened.

MA: Pearl Harbor, right?

HT: Yeah. Pearl Harbor happened. And we couldn't make payments. And then the neighbor, I think the person that took us, I think he bought it. And then in 1950, my husband and I went back to see everything and the house was still there. They had it all fixed up. The barn was still there, but they had taken all the grapes out and they had peach trees up. And, but, it was just a sad situation, but we just bought a new refrigerator and new stove. We were just beginning to see that we were so poor in those days. And then now we had to try to sell everything because we just had just a few weeks to get rid of everything. But I think we sold the refrigerator and stuff for two dollars or something like that. They just came. Everybody came and I always say, it was just like, in those days, all those people from the southern states, they would come in their little broken down cars and their furniture on top and they would come and park close to all the Japanese people because they knew we were going to leave. I said, "How do they know that?" But, see, we didn't have radios in those days. And so they came to school and everything, but we had to have, not a, like a garage sale. We had it all out and some of the people that had real nice Japanese dishes, they couldn't get anything for it, so they would throw it down on the ground and break it because they didn't want to sell it for pennies or whatever it was. So just before we left, well, we did sell the stove and refrigerator and then my mother said, "Okay," she says, she had a great big wedding picture. It was real, like this, both of them. It was in the parlor room and she said, "You know, I'm going to leave that and some pictures. The war is not going to end. They'll will protect our home. We'll come back." That's the way she was. She was so believing, and so I said, "No, I want to take those pictures." See, I was a hoarding type of person. And she says, "No, we're going to do this." So I said, "Okay, then we'll do that." So we took the picture and then we left. Next day my sister and her husband and two kids just came to check the house. Everything was gone. We had an upright piano, nobody wanted to buy it, so they pulled that out. Everything, even dishes, and little things. The pictures were gone. And we didn't know what to tell my mother 'cause she was such a woman. She just believed in what she wanted to see. She was truly a Buddhist, I'm not kidding. And finally, we told her and it just broke her heart. It really did because she just wanted to protect the place and to come back. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be crying, but it just fills me up, just thinking about what they went through. They really went through a lot to give us education.

And my, one of my middle sisters, she got married in camp, but, she was the one that said, "You got to study hard and go to college." And we said, "Why should we go to college?" There are a lot of people that went to college, they're working out on the farm, they couldn't get jobs in those days. So, one of the girls that I know real well, she went into business. She learned to type and all that. So that's what I went into. I learned typing and everything. And to this day, I was a medical secretary and I was a business, took care of that doctor's office. And I think that helped me. Because I always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but with talking to the kids, it's brought me -- all the teachers say, "You are a teacher. You don't have to have education. You're talking to them, teaching them." Even like I told you, that one boy said, "All the things she lost she still had the courage to come to tell us about what she went through." And everybody said, well, you get 20,000 dollars. That's nothing when we took it. But my father and mother were dead. They're the ones that wanted to get it.

MA: Right, the Isseis were the ones who really...

HT: Yeah, they suffered a lot. And it was just sad.

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