<Begin Segment 6>

KL: Say the name of the town that you moved to again?

AO: We called it Cienega, and now maybe the proper pronunciation is Cienega.

KL: I don't know. As Alisa knows, I moved from California when I was pretty little, so I'm kind of relearning all the...

AO: C-I-E-N-E-G-A.

KL: Cienega.

AO: Yeah. And it wasn't a town, it was just a valley. We had a one-room schoolhouse there, and it was twelve or fourteen miles southeast of Hollister, kind of in a valley.

KL: Who else was there when you moved there? Who were your close neighbors?

AO: The close neighbors were the Smiths, and that's where my father rented the property from, Mr. Smith. Grandpa Smith was just a love, we called him Grandpa. And he had a daughter Vernie who unfortunately had an illegitimate child, and so was ostracized by the community. And we loved Vernie, and, of course, Vernie's daughter Georgia was a year or two older than Toshi, and she took us all under her wing and taught us how to ride horses and stuff.

KL: Georgia was the illegitimate daughter?

AO: Yeah.

KL: So did they stay local?

AO: Yeah, they stayed there. And so to this day, Toshi corresponds with Georgia. Georgia is living in Monterey County somewhere.

KL: So you said the community ostracized them, but your family was still close?

AO: Yeah. And my mother, I mean, they were people to be loved, and they were kind to us, too. Mr. Smith had all the makings of a blacksmith shop, so that used to be fun to go in and watch him pound on the horseshoes.

KL: Yeah, that's exciting stuff. Did he, was he her father, Grandpa Smith was Vernie's father?

AO: Vernie's father, so Georgia's grandfather.

KL: Did they stay close, or was there a rift between them?

AO: No, no. Grandpa Smith loved Vernie. I don't know what happened to Vernie's mother. I never heard, but I remember in the living room over the fireplace there were pictures of ancestors.

KL: How long had they been in that valley, the Smith family, do you know?

AO: I never bothered to find out. To me, they were there forever. And Vernie had a couple of brothers who were, yeah, they were both policemen in L.A. And every year, they would each come up.

KL: That was in the 1930s?

AO: Yeah.

AL: How old was Georgia when you guys lived there?

AO: Georgia must have been like about two or three, I guess.

KL: How far away were the houses from each other, your house and the Smiths' house?

AO: I guess we had a lane to go up that was shorter than our driveway.

KL: And both houses were on that lane?

AO: Yeah, the big house was there, and then came down here and went down the lane, and then our house was down.

KL: Was his blacksmith thing his means of support?

AO: The blacksmith shop was... I don't know if that was a means of support or what, but he may have been doing that. And then when my father came along and rented the field from him, that became his source of income.

KL: Your family's source of income.

AO: Yeah. Well, his family's. His source of income was our renting the land.

KL: What did you grow?

AO: The lettuce seed. It was all just lettuce for seed. And of course then we had a big vegetable patch and grew all our vegetables, and that kept things going during the recession.

KL: How did you feel about the vegetable patch? Was it just kind of there, or was it fun, or was it tedious?

AO: Oh, it was fun because, I mean, you go out there and you pick everything you needed. And we would grow, I remember, watermelons. We had quite a lot of, you know, must have been about a quarter acre of watermelons, because we'd go running around in the summertime and it'd be hot, so we'd find a ripe watermelon, smash it, wash your hands in it, get another one, open it, and eat it.

KL: That's a lot of watermelons. Did you sell them, did you have a stand or anything?

AO: No, uh-uh. Sharing, we'd take 'em to school. It was a one-room schoolhouse, and we'd take the watermelons to school, and there was a creek running along behind the school, and we'd put the watermelons in there, and then on Friday, school let out early and then we'd bring out the watermelons and cut 'em. We had a wonderful teacher then.

KL: How big was the school? How many students?

AO: When the migrant workers would come through, it would swell the population to about thirty students. And then ordinarily there were maybe twenty.

KL: Do you know anything about the migrant workers' circuit, where else they would go?

AO: They would be picking prunes and probably cutting cots.

KL: Cots? What's that?

AO: Apricots.

KL: Oh. I haven't heard that before.

AO: Is that right? [Laughs] And I guess help with harvesting some of the other, some of the farms. I know for us, we had, my father would hire help during the harvest.

KL: Where did those people live?

AO: There was a building that... where did they live? There was a barn, and there was another building there. Did they live with us? I don't remember. I remember Placido, and what was the other one's name? He was really nice. Two men that came. Whether they were there all the time or just in the harvest, because they helped my father plant and all that sort of thing, too, to they must have lived somewhere around there. Gosh, isn't that terrible? When you're that age...

KL: Well, this was a long time ago.

AO: ...you just accept them.

KL: Yeah, at that age you're just kind of yourself, and everything else is an extension of yourself.

AO: And I never bothered asking my older sister, but I'll have to see if she remembers where they stayed?

KL: Where were they from, do you know?

AO: They were Filipinos. So they were Asian, so they knew...

KL: How did you communicate with them, in English?

AO: English.

KL: Did they speak Spanish, too?

AO: They probably spoke Tagalog, which is the Filipino language. Among themselves they spoke something I couldn't understand, but we communicated in English. And they'd been here for quite some time, so they spoke English.

KL: Did your folks ever learn English?

AO: Oh, yeah.

KL: Did they know it in Japan?

AO: I don't think so. They learned it here, learned it, I mean, took some classes. Because she felt it important that we continue learning, knowing Japanese, but also that she could communicate with us and our friends. So she made it a point to learn English.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.