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TI: So now you're out of the army, you're in St. Paul, what do you do next?

GY: St. Paul, okay, I went to a business school after I got out, and I took up accounting, and I worked different places. First I started working at a wholesale TV place, then from there, I went to a co-op, a cooperative, oil co-op at a service station, repair service. And I stayed there for a couple, three years, I think. That's where I learned the background to the co-op fundamentals. And the credit union movement, I got to know that, which helped me later on, being an organizer of the credit union. From there, I went to a wholesale meat house. I learned all about the meat cutting business.

TI: Now, when you would go to these jobs or these different places, were you working as an accountant?

GY: Yeah.

TI: Okay.

GY: All the time, yeah.

TI: So you weren't out there necessarily on the floor, you were actually doing the books and learning the business through the financial side.

GY: Right. Then from the meat place, I got kind of tired there, so I thought, well, I'll change someplace else, and I went to an employment agency and they assigned me to a furniture store up here in Minneapolis. I ended up there in '52 or '53. Then that's when I went and met my wife, future wife-to-be, and we worked there 1955, we closed the shop, and both of us went to another wholesale house where we handled furniture. We represented Bassett Furniture Industries, and I stayed there for thirty-nine years.

TI: And what was your role there?

GY: My role there was to keep the accounting going. I had, in and out of merchandise warehouse inventory stuff, and I oversaw a couple of shipping clerks, that was it. And my wife took care of the orders and customers coming in, and we stayed there thirty-nine years.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.