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MA: Well, I was wondering if I could ask you some more questions about your childhood, and Parlier. Can you tell me a little bit about the town of Parlier? Was it mainly a farming town?

HT: It's a little tiny store. I mean, you could go peep and then you would pass the store. There was a little, the first store was my real good friend. She had a candy store and all kinds of...we used to buy, pennies, and buy a big bag of candy. And then they used to have card in the back and they used to play, what do you call that? The balls that you put in the hole or whatever. They had that and then they had a, some, next door was Ogami and they used to have a little grocery store. And then a whole bunch of Chinese people in the back of that. And that's about it. And then Parlier, other people, they had, the Caucasians, they had stores and everything.

MA: What about, like, were there Filipinos living there at the time?

HT: Yes, there were some Filipinos. But that was the strangest thing because when I came to Minnesota, I had real good Filipino friends, and they looked like us exactly. But I said, "How come the Filipinos in California look like they were blacks?" And they said, "they come from different sections of Philippines." So when I came here I have a real good friend that the doctor that I worked for was a Filipino. He looked just like a Japanese and I didn't realize that. There was another incident that happened, I was on the streetcar going to, I was working at the University of Minnesota and this man said, "Oh you must be..." in those days we wore real thick wool clothes because it was so cold in the snow. And this man said, "Oh you must be used to this. Aren't you from Alaska?" [Laughs] I thought I'm not from Alaska. And I came home and looked in an encyclopedia and sure enough, they look like us. It's really funny to have all those incidents happening.

MA: Well what about, how were the sort of race relations when you were growing up in Parlier, between the whites and the Asians and the Mexicans?

HT: See, we were kids and there was nothing for us. I don't know if my parents were that way. But all our neighbors were Caucasians and we all got along real good. And we used to ride the bus to school and everything. I don't think there was, at least to me, I never felt it. I don't think my father and mother, they didn't talk about it.

MA: And the workers on the farms, were there workers that helped you?

HT: No, we did our own farming. And then most of them would be like Mexicans and stuff like that. They used to come. And we did have a family that worked in the, we had a little house out there and, yeah, they did work there a little bit. But I don't know how, I don't think they got paid very much, but just to get something. I don't think I ran into prejudice, even if I came here. It was really a strange thing because all my... when we first came here they couldn't believe we were here, so I had to tell them because they didn't read it in their books. They didn't have it in the books in those days. Just one sentence.

MA: The textbooks, you mean.

HT: Yeah. So they didn't know about us, so they said, "You have to talk to the kids nowadays."

MA: And growing up, can you tell me a little bit about your elementary school?

HT: Yeah, we used to have a country school, we used to have a 3 room - it was a 2 room school. And I felt sorry for the teachers. We were first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. And then one teacher would be teaching one, would say, "Okay, we'll do this today. And then you read." And you would go to the next class, the next class like that. And they went up to seventh, ninth grade, I think, no eighth grade. Went up to ninth...I can't remember now. But it was a three room school and it was really something. I could still remember the teachers, Miss Wash and Miss Bertleson. They were really good teachers. And then naturally whatever we did we would mind, there was nobody that talked bad or anything. In those days it was good to be teachers. I don't know about now but...

<End Segment 4> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.