Densho Digital Archive - Alley Watada Interview (denshovh-walley-01-0006)

<Begin Segment 6>

RP: Can you lead us through maybe a typical day on the farm for you, say in the summer or spring?

AW: Oh, in the summer?

RP: When things were really busy.

AW: Oh, sure. Well, I don't know if so busy, but I do remember among the people, the Isseis, it was always a competition as to who's going to be out in the farm earliest, I think. And I do know that my parents made sure that we fed the pig or did our chores first thing in the morning, and we were out on the farm by six o'clock in the morning. And the thing that was, once in a while, neighbor farmer would have to go through our yard with a tractor, and it was interesting. I think the neighbor also was trying to compete, because the tractor would come by about 5:30 or 5:45, so my mother would say, "Hurry up, hurry up, get out." [Laughs] So we would go out there and start weeding first thing in the morning. And whether it's weeding or harvesting or whatnot, we would start very early in the morning. And middle of the day, we always had a sandwich about ten o'clock, nine-thirty or ten o'clock we had a sandwich. Then Mother would have lunch ready for all of us. Those days, I think we had dinner for lunch. We didn't have lunch, he had a big meal during dinnertime, at noontime, and then we'd go back out, and then about three or four o'clock, they would have another, they would bring sandwiches out again to give us a break, and we'd work until about six or seven o'clock, and then come home and do our chores.

That was the end of the days when we were weeding, but when we were harvesting, it was a little different. We would have to, depending on who went to the market, they would leave early in the morning, be at the market by six o'clock, and then in the evening, we would be out packing the boxes that would go to the market the following morning.

[Interruption]

RP: Alley, we were just talking about where --

AW: Oh, that's right.

RP: -- you shipped your vegetables.

AW: Yeah, yeah.

RP: Did you have a, was there a packing shed?

AW: There was a, yeah that's right, there was a small packing shed in the nearby town. But most of the material, we took it to Denver. And, well, let me back up. For fresh produce, like tomatoes, we would take it to the Denver market, early in the morning. If it was potatoes, they would have a contract that, shed there in, in Fort Lupton that they would deliver to. And then there was a processing company also in Fort Lupton. So they would take things like the beans, the pinto beans, certain things that they could process. So the source, the sites were different, depending on the crop.

RP: Depending on the crop.

AW: Right, uh-huh.

RP: And who, who ran these packing sheds or processing firms? Were Japanese Issei involved in the production and marketing of vegetables in the area, too?

AW: Not to my knowledge. The plants were all owned individually, except the potato was a co-op. And so -- association, I should say, a potato association, so all the farmers got together and they hired someone to run the shed and to sell the potato. But in terms of the processing plant, it was a family-owned business. And so I don't recall anyone of Japanese ancestry running the packing sheds.

RP: But there were cooperatives of Japanese farmers?

AW: They had a co-op of which they used to help inform the Japanese farmers of price of the produce that, price that they could get for the produce at that time. Because at that time they had no ways of knowing what should they ask for. So that's what they did.