Densho Digital Archive - Bill Hirabayashi Interview (denshovh-hbill

<Begin Segment 12>

BH: Well, I'm going to backtrack a little bit. Way back when I was home, a guy stopped in front of the highway and he came in and he says, "Do you have any gas?" I said, "Well, sure, we have to have gas on the farm." I said, "We've got gas." He said, "Well, I want to buy it." No, he didn't say, "I want to buy it," he said, "I need some gas for my car." And so I thought he wanted to buy gas, so I took the five gallon, we used to put in the truck and stuff like that. And I filled it up and walked out to the highway with a funnel, and I put it in his car, and then I said, "Well, Mrs. Purcell at the gas station," half a mile from our place, I said, "she sells gas for twenty-one cents a gallon or five gallons for a dollar." So I said, "Since I put five gallons in your car," I said, "you owe my dad a dollar." The guy said, "I don't have a dollar." I said, "Well, why did you ask for gas?" "It's because my car is out of gas." I said, "Look, I never stole from my dad, and I'm not going to steal from my dad now. Because," I said, "you owe him a dollar." And I said, "Either that, or I stole five gallons of gas from my dad." Anyway, so then I just went over and opened up the guy's hood on his car, I took his -- there's two clips on the car -- I took the two clips off, took the distributor cap off and I took the rotor, which is a part of the, to make the car run, I took that off and stuck it in my pocket. And he says, "What are you going to do that for?" And I didn't say anything, and he says, "You do that and my car won't run." I said, "Well, that's the general idea," I said. "You owe my dad a dollar." And so then I started going back towards the house, he said, "Wait a minute, come here, kid." He says, "See that thing on the back of my car?" I says, "Well, I see a couple of boxes," looked like a couple of coffins. But I said, "So what's that got to do with you owe me a dollar?" He says, "That's a pinball machine." He says, "I repair pinball machines for people at the bars and so on and so forth." And I said, "Yeah, so what's that got to do with me?" He says, "I'll put that into one of your rooms and you guys could play with it." And all of a sudden a light bulb went off in my head and I thought, gee, at the dormitory we could, we'd go up our skyway and go into the dormitory. So then, anyway, I helped him -- to make a long story short -- we brought it up there and he set it up, and he said, "See this little ring?" There was a wire hanging in the middle. And he said, "When you tilt the machine, it's going to say 'tilt' on it." And we plugged it in and I said to him, "Well, what good is this machine? We don't have a, us kids don't have a nickel to operate the thing." Said, "Well, you don't need it." He says, "This lever here, when you put the nickel in here and push this lever, it pushes this lever here." And so he pushed it, he had the front box open, and he said, "See, now?" It all lit up and everything came on, and then he pulled the lever and the silver ball went out and it started playing. He says, "You can play with this until I come back through here the next time, and then I'll give you the dollar and I'll take the pinball machine." This is about 1935 or '36. When the war started, he still didn't come back to pay us the dollar for the gas. [Laughs] So we had all kinds of fun things at our house, 'cause when my dad bought my sister a new piano 'cause she was taking piano lessons, then we took the, we had a pump organ, we brought that upstairs to the dormitory. So we had a pump organ and we had this pinball machine and different things like that. So my life, when I was a kid, I had fun all my life.

MA: And what happened to all this stuff?

BH: We just had to leave everything just the way that... we couldn't sell furniture, beds and stuff, we just had to leave it. My brother, I guess, tried renting it out, and went to the bank. I guess they did rent it out and they deposited it in our account and stuff. But then naturally after you can't pay taxes the following year and stuff, the government, that was the end of that.

MA: And your property, did you arrange to have someone stay there?

BH: We couldn't do it because they said that Mr. Katsuno and my dad, I think they had a neighbor that... 'cause Gordon's parents stopped farming and they went to the East Highway and they started a, they bought the Economy Market which was a grocery store and market that they bought from a Mr. Mizuno, in-laws. So then there was a Filipino next door, an Albert, I think my parents and the Katsunos had Albert harvest it or whatever. But I don't know if they got any money out of it or not. That's something I don't know about.