Densho Digital Archive - Bill Hirabayashi Interview (denshovh-hbill

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BH: And, in fact, talking about getting along with Caucasians, remember I just mentioned Ray Hattori? That he and I used to hold the flag for the JACL thing? Well, the janitor, when I was in grade school, Mr. Robson, his wife used to cook the hot, lunch, hot meals for the kids. But Mr. Robson took a liking to me. And I used to, during my recess, I used to go into the boiler room where he was, it was nice and warm, and we'd talk until he'd look at his watch, his dollar watch like that or whatever you call it, and he'd say, "You better get going, 'cause the bell's going to ring pretty soon." But he was such an inspiration. He said to me, "The only way you're going to, a person is ever going to make any big money is you have to invent something." And I said, "Well, how do you invent something?" He said, "You have to figure out something," and he says, "I'll give you an example," he said. "Invent something that isn't, that can't be used over. Something that has to be disposable." And I didn't know what disposable was at the time and I had to ask him. And he explained to me, "Things like toothpick," and a few other things he mentioned. Well, then, about, I think it was a couple years later, I was in the boiler room one time, and, "Dou know what's out now? We talked about it," he said, "we missed the boat." I said, "What kind of thing are you talking about?" He says, "There's a place in Wisconsin that makes Kleenex, so you don't have to have a handkerchief. You can blow your nose and throw it away." And that was disposable. But in between that time, he talked about other things. He said, "Another thing," he says, "there's a thing called perpetual motion." And at that age, I didn't know what a perpetual motion was, so he explained it to me. And he said, "For example," he says, "you've seen these little birds with the water in a cup, and it'll go back and forth as long as there's water in there, it moves by itself." He says, "Well, in that fashion, you have to take advantage of the sun." He said, "There's things that you can do, and if somebody could harness this and that" -- and this is way back in the '30s -- and now when I think of it, you have all these calculators that are held by hand. I know the first calculator I had, my wife bought it for me back in, around 1961 or '2, and we just paid a fortune so that I could take care of things when I was on the road to make estimates for people and all that. But Mr. Robson was that intelligent. And when I think of it now, if only he could be alive, and if he could see the things like at Microsoft and all these different things, it would really blow his mind. Because he had all these dreams, and he was like an intelligent man, like I say, "You have to do this and that." And then we had a project in school that we had to do something, so then he helped me with a crystal set so that I could use a little crystal and put it by an earphone and you could hear the radio station from Tacoma or Seattle, things like that. But he was always, I would say, I didn't know what the word "mentor" meant at that time, but that's what he was. He was a mentor without me realizing. He's just a likable guy.

Well, Ray Hattori's younger brother Mickey and I were always invited to Mr. Robson and his family's Thanksgiving. We always got to eat at one o'clock and come home, and we got another Thanksgiving dinner about three-thirty, four o'clock again. And so both Mickey and myself, we were very fortunate that Mr. Robson liked us and we did things like that. But that's the way it was in my memory. All the Caucasians, we got along well that way.

MA: I wanted to ask you about, when you were in high school, if you had hopes of attending college?

BH: Yes. This is why I took a German class and took my, you had to have a science in your different things. So I was all qualified to go to the University of Washington. But because of the war, that's why I stopped.

MA: Well, and you said your father wanted you to work for a year, right?

BH: Well, he just said, more or less what he was saying is, "I can't send you to university this fall because Helen is going. And so maybe if you wait a year, Martin will be back from Japan and maybe he'll have a job." Everything was always a potluck deal, we all pitched in on everything. And so I was working for George Kawachi at Floralcrest in Renton, and things were going well, and that's when the war broke out. But...

MA: I'm sorry, where were you working?

BH: In Renton. And there was a friend of my parents, a fellow by the name of George Kawachi. His place was called Floralcrest and I worked for him. And when the war broke out, then we had to evacuate that way.