<Begin Segment 10>

KL: Do you have questions about Half Moon Bay?

LP: Well, sort of in comparing, since you've been in the Bay Area for quite a while, what are the major changes that you noticed between Half Moon Bay as a child and Half Moon Bay now?

ST: When we left, the population was 982 or something like that. I don't know what it is now. It was all farmland.

MS: So when we left, the population dropped quite a bit then. [Laughs] It's about four Japanese families?

ST: I only know two... three. Satos, Kakimotos, and us.

MS: Katos.

ST: Huh?

MS: The Katos.

ST: They were in Montara or someplace.

MS: Oh, yeah, well, they were in the area.

ST: Oh, yeah.

KL: You said the Satos and the Kakimotos?

MS: Kakimoto, yes. Mr. and Mrs. Kakimoto, they...

ST: They had a nursery downtown. That's where my brothers worked.

MS: They had no children and they wanted to adopt Chick, since we had so many in the family, but Mom said no. [Laughs] She wanted to keep all of her kids.

KL: What about the Satos? What was their family like?

MS: Well, they were farmers just like everybody else. They grew more flowers, didn't they? We had vegetables, but they had a lot of flowers, too, didn't they?

ST: I don't know. I remember their having celery.

KL: What did you guys grow? I guess I didn't ask.

ST: Everything, vegetables. Anything you can think of.

MS: I guess they called it truck farming. So you have carrots and beans and peas and everything. They also, our parents also grew some of the crops for the Japanese people, which was a little bit different, because what do you call gobo? What do you call gobo?

ST: Black root. Gobo is black root.

MS: Yeah, but there an English name for gobo, I forget what it is.

ST: Yeah?

MS: Yeah. Anyway...

Off camera: Gourd?

KL: A gourd?

MS: No, it's not a gourd, it's a different name for it. But anyway, there were several things that they grew just for the Japanese market.

KL: Who were the customers?

ST: Half Moon Bay grocery store, Takahashi, couple of stores in the city.

MS: Yeah, I guess Dad used to make the deliveries on those.

ST: And the leftovers went to the market.

MS: But later on they converted almost all to strawberries, so that's when they started making a little more money.

ST: What's that?

MS: The strawberries. Because the strawberries were a lot more... it's much more labor intensive, but they were able to --

ST: It had a lot of labor.

MS: Yeah.

KL: You. Did they ever hire laborers?

MS: No. In fact, the boys worked for other people to keep the family going a lot of times.

KL: So they switched to strawberries sometime in the '30s before the war?

MS: Just before the war, yeah. Because originally we only had a couple...

ST: Didn't switch, but they raised quite a bit of strawberry.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.