Densho Digital Archive - Bill Hirabayashi Interview (denshovh-hbill

<Begin Segment 24>

MA: So tell me about your children. You have two boys?

BH: I have two boys, they're both in the business with me. But my son that was in the parts, I mean, in the dealership, because of that, he went to school in Michigan, they have a dealers, they call it Dealers University. And he went there to learn the trade beyond what he had been doing. 'Cause he knew the thing pretty well, but then for me to turn it over, he had to know a lot more. So it was one of those deals where you go from one dealership to the other as a, like a class. And yet they were learning by, learning from different places. And then he did that for some time and then he finished school that way, and then he was with me.

MA: And what is your, what is this son's name?

BH: Larry.

MA: Larry.

BH: He's the younger of the two, but my son Ron, after he graduated college, he went to work for Harford Insurance, and he worked for them for a while. And then with political reasons, things were getting to the point where he wasn't happy. And I needed help at my Foreign Auto Parts store, because I had two stores, one in Minneapolis, one in St. Paul. And then so I let Ron work at that, and then it got to a point where he did better that way than I did, so then he ran the parts stores. Then one day, when, this was in 1994, the Bumper To Bumper stores, they had about thirty stores, Bill Laird was a friend of mine, he came by and he said, "What would it take to steal your son from you?" I said, "Well, if you steal Ron," I said, "The store has to go, too, 'cause then I'd quit." 'Cause I says, you know, 'cause I had already retired at the age of sixty-five, supposedly. So then he says, "Well, what do you need to do this?" I said, "Well, you give Ron a good deal," and I said, "you buy my store's inventory from wall to wall. And you don't have to buy the buildings, 'cause I could get rid of it." And so then he said, "Okay, well, we'll talk about it." Well, then in two days, he called me up and he said, "Can we meet over at Ogaras in St. Paul?" So we went there, and they said, "Okay, when can we send a crew of people in there to take inventory?" and all that. And I said, "By December first, you can close the door." And that's what happened. So then Ron's been working with Bumper To Bumper 'til Bill Laird passed away, and then the place was bought by O'Reilly Auto Parts, and so he's still working for them, too. But the way it turned out is that the reason they wanted Ron, because foreign auto parts are a lot different than American parts in the sense that a Toyota or any other car like that. They make parts for it, one outfit, another outfit makes it from, say, from January to June, one outfit makes it. Then from June to December, another outfit would make it, or whatever time in between, they farm it out to different places. So the parts aren't the same as on the car. So on the, every Toyota car, they have to read the plate on the door that says manufacturing time would be six of ninety-two or whatever it happens to be, you see what I mean? And so what was happening at Bumper To Bumper, they'd send out, they'd sell two truckload of parts, and then one truckload would come back. Because people didn't know what part to send. So what they would do if somebody called in, they didn't have the knowledge, they'd say, "Well, there's three kind of different parts that would fit that car." So they'd send three parts out there. Naturally, it cost the company money, so they hired... that's why they wanted Ron, so he was in the office, so if they didn't know which part number to use, then they had to buzz around. And he would look it up and say, "Okay, that car takes such and such. If the time is, the date is such and such, this is what it takes." And that's the way it went. He was the first Japanese Oriental to work there, and now it's, naturally, there's a lot of Hmong boys working there, 'cause they found out that they were hard workers, Orientals are hard workers, see. But that's kind of a deal, so Ron is still with -- and he's actually of age to retire, but he can still work, and they still want him, so they transferred him from one store to the other just within the last week or two. And it's closer to home for him, and that's what's happening.

MA: So I wanted to ask you, too, about your father and your parents. What did they do after the war, what type of work did they get into?

BH: Well, when they came here, my mother worked in a clothing factory there doing seamstress work or something. And then my dad went to work at the Nickler Hotel in the kitchen, and that's about it. But my dad went to, when he retired from the Hotel Nickler, and then they asked him to come back because somebody was in the hospital. So my dad went back to work for a while, and then they told him, "Well, you don't have to come back next week." My dad said, "No," he says he had nothing to do, "so I'll come anyway." And he went, and so they put him back on the job and he worked another, I don't know how many years, but three or four years. And then he worked until he was in his seventies. This is why he's, he's a person that can't, he's more or less, he's not as fidgety as I am, but he wants to be doing something all the time. And so that's where he got the word "useful."