<Begin Segment 6>

MA: What was a typical day like for you when you were in elementary school?

HT: Well, first we'd go, I'd go, finally we got a bicycle, so the rest of us we'd go and I would buck her to school. And then we would come home and the first thing we did after school, first thing we do is I have to cook the rice, and then we have a lot of vegetables. And my best one was cooking eggplants and make okazu, you know? And my sister was in charge of bringing the water into the bathtub and she'd burn the, do the bath. And we would clean the house a little bit, but then we had supper waiting for everybody. That's about our routine. And then we'd do whatever homework we had, but I don't think we had too many homework. We could do that in school.

MA: And was your mother working?

HT: Yeah, she worked with my father.

MA: With your father.

HT: Yeah. And then every once and a while in the summertime, there's a Japanese people that used to have peaches and apricots and we used to cut 'em, cut the apricots. I was very good, take the pit out and you put it on the tray and then put it in the sulfur in the smoke house. And I used to get sick. it was just smelling that. And then we used to get three cents and they used to punch it, big lug box like this full of things. We got three cents after you do that. But it helped. And then my mother used to climb up on the peach tree to pick up the peaches. She was a strong lady. Just to work out when my dad was out at home working on the farm.

MA: And you said earlier that you made raisins and you would sell the raisins. But you also had another, you would sell the grapes to the wineries?

HT: The wineries, yes. We had the Malaga. The Malaga is those white ones and then muscat, you got muscat wine. And then they used to come, we used pick it and put the boxes out and then the truck would come and they would just have to put it in there. And then that's, so we had Malaga, muscat, and Thompson grapes.

MA: And who would you sell the raisins to?

HT: They used to put it in the sweatboxes and then my father would take it to wherever, I think it was towards Fresno someplace, and just sell it. But you don't get too much. The sweatboxes were huge. But we used to walk to school before, and they used to have cherry trees and everything and the grapes. And we, the teacher would come, I mean, the owner would come and say, "Tell the kids they cannot pick those things." "Oh, we were picking them off the ground." [Laughs] You would see those free things growing on the road. I don't think we were stealing, but we didn't pick it, we just got it from the ground. The teacher said, "Don't do that."

<End Segment 6> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.