Densho Digital Archive - Bill Hirabayashi Interview (denshovh-hbill

<Begin Segment 16>

MA: So I had a question about, so you said it was an estate farm? So what does that mean, exactly?

BH: It was a... the only way I could describe it, it's on the corner of the farm, but it's a big house with a swimming pool, with a bar, badminton court, it's all, it's entertainment. It's an estate, is what it is.

MA: And the farm was just sort of part of that?

BH: The farm was just, it was called the Grassmere Farm, but the farm was more or less a front for the estate. But then I made the farm pay off by cultivating it, whether it be plowing and disking it, planting corn and harvesting oats, wheat, all that stuff. And then I still had a lot of livestock to take care of, whether it was, it'd be cows, or chicken, just about anything. You mention any kind of animal, we had it. Because my boss more or less entertained the movie actors and actresses, kind of looked around the place and they'd go back, so we had to keep the place up that way.

MA: And it was only you?

BH: Yeah, during the wintertime. But then when I first went to work for him, there was, including me, there was four of us to run the place. And so naturally I had to improvise to do the same job, that there were that many people. And I was fortunate enough with my wife's help. She didn't work for him, but she helped me when she was going to the beauty school and all that kind of stuff, she helped me with different things. And so I improvised so many things that my boss was proud of me, and my head swelled up, naturally. But like the swimming pool, when all the dandelion fuzz starts to blow around, it's just full of that stuff on the swimming pool. Well, this fellow Charlie, the first year I went there, that was his job, to take a little net with a circle like a butterfly net, only it had regular net. And he's be scooping that thing up almost all day, and that was his job, so to speak. Plus, when there's dandelions on the orchard and on the lawn and stuff, they had to spray... I forgot what they called it now.

MA: A pesticide?

BH: Yeah, but there was a name for it. But anyway, they had to make a mixture of it and spray it to kill it. Well, that was another job where Ray Hefter would have this, like a wheelbarrow, size of a garbage can, with water in there, and he'd have to pump it while Charlie had a hose on it, and he'd be spraying it. And every so often, Ray would have to follow him and pump it some more. And so it used to take a day and a half for the two to do that job. Well, I improvised, I got the job done in less than a half a day. 'Cause what I did, being that Mr. Byfield gave me permission to do whatever I wanted to benefit the farm, I went over to Miller Hardware and got a pump, and I fabricated it onto the tractor so that I could run that with a belt that we used to use for grinding feed. And then I got a piece of pipe and put it in front of the tractor with a little, I put threads in it, and I put little spray nozzles on it, eight feet of it. So that now I had this fifty-five gallon tank in the back of the tractor, on the drawbar, and I chained it on so it won't fall. And I put the mixture on there and I put the suction hose in there. And so then I'd go right up to the trees in the orchard, and then I'd step on the clutch and that would stop the pump from going. And I'd turn the valve off, I'd back up and go along the tree and start the same way. And the same with the lawn, the estate had a big round deal and I just drove the tractor with that, and sprayed all that stuff. So I was able to do it in half a day with one person instead of two people. So those are the kind of things that I did, and many other things.

This is why Mr. Byfield, well, he was real good to me. He gave me all kinds of raises, and even gave Anice checks because, like, Tilly was the housekeeper, and she kept an eye on the place, sort of, on that end of it. And whenever my wife helped me on anything, she told Mr. Byfield about it. Because I never said anything, but he wanted to, one day he says, "I want to see how you clean the swimming pool. Because Tilly says that you and Anice clean it in five minutes' time." And I said, well, I went out to the, we had a warehouse, and I went over to the warehouse and all that. And what I did was I had two pieces of pipe, and made an "H" out of it, so it had a big "H." Well, the "H" end was the width of the swimming pool. And I put a net in between there, and put a rope on the bottom, and I made this cloth net on that. So then Anice would help me, we'd take it into the swimming pool, start from the edge, and I'd walk all the way around to the edge of it, and we'd go all the way to the end of the pool, and we'd lift it up and all the leaves and everything would come on to that. And then we'd take it outside of the warehouse, and the sun would dry it out, and it would all come off. What little I didn't get, I'd take that little thing that Charlie used to use, and I'd scoop it up and I'm all done. So all we had to do was walk through the length of the swimming pool and it was all done. So those are the kind of things that I had to do because I didn't have all that help at the time. Although my brothers were there helping on the farm. But certain things, I just did it so that we wouldn't have to use labor, to save the labor on that.