Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Alley Watada Interview
Narrator: Alley Watada
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Denver, Colorado
Date: May 15, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-walley-01-0010

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RP: Did you hire additional labor or was your family enough?

AW: Oh, no, no. We hired, we had a, like I think all vegetable growers, I think, I don't know. Anyway, we had a house for laborers, and these were Hispanic people, they farmed there. And let me see, I remember when the war broke out, I'm not quite sure what happened, but we were short of people in terms of harvesting sugar beets. And this would be 1942, and that's when people moved into Amache camp. And there, my father knew one of his friends were there, so he, this fellow, Mr. Hamamoto, and another fellow came out and moved into the house that we had for the laborers, and they helped us harvest sugar beets. So you had that kind of experience. Then in Fort Lupton, there were more ethnic groups. Well, no, I shouldn't say there were more. Well, I guess there were more people of Japanese ancestry in Fort Lupton area, and there, during the war, labor was short, so I remember bringing prisoners, German prisoners on the farm to help harvest potatoes.

RP Do you remember anything specific about that experience?

AW: Yes, there was a couple of things. One was that we were instructed that we weren't to feed them anything, we weren't to, we're not supposed to be doing anything with them. And my mother felt sorry for them because my mother found out that all they had was a hard roll and something for lunch, my mother said that we need to give them food when we take our break. So as I said, during ten o'clock and three o'clock, we would get a sandwich or something to eat or drink. So she made a point to have a sandwich for each one of the soldiers, baloney sandwich, I remember the baloney sandwich, and if there was, say, twenty-five soldiers, prisoners out there, she would make twenty-five sandwiches. And as I said, we were instructed not to feed them, so my mother made a point to make the sandwiches and asked us to leave it near the field where they knew where it was, and tell 'em it's there, but it was not real visible to outside people. And the soldiers were interesting in terms of, given that they were told that there's a, one sandwich for them, so they would kind of quietly go over and get their sandwich and help themselves at ten o'clock and three o'clock, they did that. So it was an interesting thing in terms of laborers.

RP: Right. You had, you had to utilize whatever resources you had there.

AW: Right. Uh-huh. And the... I used to, at that time, run the potato harvesters. And in the potato harvester there's chains that goes wrapped around and once in a while the chains would break and it's a chore to try to put the chains back together. And those fellows, as soon as the chain broke, they were there helping me put it together and they were fantastic. They had the strength. They were a little older than I was so they had the strength to put the chain together. We would continue harvesting. They were not... let me put it this way, a lot of people when you get laborers like that when you, you would think well, if the chain broke that's his fault. You would just sit back and wait. They took on their initiative to come and help me so that I could continually dig the potatoes.

RP: Great story. Sounds like there were a number of local farmers who utilized the VW labor.

AW: Right, right. Yes. I guess, I don't, I didn't know it at the time, but when you think back about it I imagine that the war took a lot of youngsters that were available for labor so we had to rely on some other source.

RP: The other group that, that was used as a labor force were the quote "newcomers" from the West Coast, Japanese Americans who had been uprooted or had, had to "voluntarily relocate," as the government referred to it, to avoid going to camps. And they showed up in huge numbers in Colorado, principally because Colorado was really their only sanctuary.

AW: Uh-huh. Right, sure.

RP: The governor, Ralph Carr, allowed, you know, sort of opened the doors to them.

AW: Uh-huh.

RP: Do you recall any of those folks coming to work on your farm or neighboring farms in the Platteville/Fort Lupton area?

AW: No, I don't. I did have a classmate, there was a classmate who said that they're helping on the farm. But I was too young to understand the need of labor, using them as the labor. So, no, I don't know that.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.