<Begin Segment 21>

TI: But in terms of, now in terms of farm work, about this time you made a shift here. You now went to the...

LH: He decided to move to near, I think it was San Dimas in Southern California, and I think he was influenced by other people, too, but I won't go into that, but he moved.

TI: Well no, I'm talking about you first, 'cause you went to the, what, the Hazmore School of Design?

LH: Hazmore.

TI: Hazmore.

LH: My mother went to sewing school, so, I don't know, she must've had an ad in the paper, Japanese paper, Hokubei or whatever it was my parents took, so I thought maybe I'll go to that. So it was a seven month course and so we learned how to draft and sew, but the thing was, the unique part was that it was on Seventh and Market, but all these Japanese girls were there. They came from Kingsburg, from Napa, from Madera, so I met all these Japanese farm girls.

TI: This is in San Francisco?

LH: At Hazmore. It was funny that we all met there. They all had the same idea to go to sewing school, so I got to be friends with all these different Japanese girls from different parts of the Bay area, well Fresno, Kingsburg, Napa, Madera... well anyway, and the Chinese. There was some Chinese, and then one of the teachers was Japanese and Mrs. Hazmore was a hakujin and they both taught drafting and sewing. So I did learn how to sew, other than from grammar school 'cause they used to teach, that was, we had to learn, but we learned how to make a suit, how to do the interfacing and a lot of things pertaining to sewing. And, but I never went into it because it was not my thing. And in between I was working at the pear ranch harvesting and picking strawberries with my mother at friend's places, and that's how I met my husband was in the strawberry farm. But I saw this ad, California Finishing Company opening up right close to where I lived, so I thought, well, I'll go apply for a job because I like art. Well, there was no artwork, but there was, he hired me for silk screening. In those days, all things are done photographically now, and in those days what they, what he did was silk screened bathing suits and drapery material, and so the screens, the screening table must be five feet, whatever, and the screens are that wide, but it could be long, and the image is photographed on there with an emulsion and everything that you don't want on there has to be painted out by hand. That was my job. And then he asked me if I had any friends that would like to work as silk screeners, so I asked my girlfriends and we're all farmers' daughters, anyway, so they all came and we had a whole team of girls, and one takes, let's see, one screener here... you have to take the frames and you have this squeegee and that's their job, and you move it to the next thing and so you keep going down this long line doing one color at a time, and that's what silk screening is. So if it has, your design has five colors, you have five different screens and five different women working on it. It was different. But they all liked their job and they all did a good job because we were all there 'til the very end. He must've been there about three years and it just didn't pay off because it was hard to compete with the East Coast. And he was from a wealthy family in Connecticut.

TI: And this is Mr. Steven Castle?

LH: Castle, right. And his, his parents were all in Standard Oil, so when he went back his brother did, I don't know, one was gas, one was oil. I think he was doing the oil part after, and so we, well, we, I worked there and then my husband, they had a laundry, so he knew how to work the washing part, so he got hired with the dye department, and when Mr. Castle came he brought his dye man, he brought his, the one that makes the screens, the silk screener. Well, the five basic people he brought from back East and then the rest of us were hired, and we were all Japanese except one silk screener was a hakujin girl and then, and she was the only hakujin other than the five main, and then in the office he hired Bill Matsumoto for the, help the, doing the bookkeeping.

TI: Do you know why Mr. Castle hired so many Japanese?

LH: I don't really know. I knew I worked hard, 'cause I...

TI: 'Cause you were the first.

LH: I was the first, and then the other one that hired was a Portuguese man from the Azores. He and I, he made the screens, the, with the lumber and the thing. And I'm trying to think who did the rest, the imaging part that I painted out. There had to have been somebody else, but it's amazing, because I always credited him for taking us out of the farm and then he hired my father-in-law, 'cause they didn't have the laundry yet, to work at home, his house and my father-in-law cooked for him and did the house work. And then he got married, so he, after he got married my father-in-law was there until they moved back East. Yeah.

TI: Did you, by any chance, stay in touch with Mr. Castle?

LH: We did, all the time. And we even went to visit him, and he lived in Stonington, which is right near Mystic, and we went out to dinner and, but at that time he had cancer already and he was going to Boston to, for his treatments. And he died maybe a year or so later. Yeah. But he was very good for all of us. And they were Jewish people.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.