Densho Digital Archive - Eddie Owada Interview (denshovh-oeddie-01-0009)

<Begin Segment 9>

AL: What else, anything else about your life in Tacoma before your father moved to Vashon? Any other memories?

EO: Yes, let's see. I remember, I remember Dad taking me over to the photo supply place where he bought paper, photo papers. The man's name was Mr. Stewart. He pronounced it differently, but I gather it was Stewart, and he took me there and I met Mr. Stewart. He was a very nice gentleman, helped Dad out with his photo supplies to quite an extent. That I remember. And I remember during the time we were running the photo studio, that one day it was just about the time the Depression was hitting pretty hard, I remember Dad saying, "I'm going down to the bank," which meant the Furuya Bank. And about maybe a half hour later, forty-five minutes, he came back with a very puzzled look on his face and he said -- this was all in Japanese -- "The bank was closed." And that was it. And that's how the banks went bankrupt. That was, they closed the doors, nothing said.

AL: So, did he lose his money then, during the Depression?

EO: Oh, yes. There was nothing to get. Bank was now closed. And so he was just stuck with just what he had on hand. And I remember moving from there to a farm, to a farmhouse in Sumner, Washington, which is just south and east of Tacoma. And we had a friend of ours, had an old -- this the boys' stuff -- Mack truck. And we piled everything in the back, pretty high. It seemed high to us. And my brother John and I rode on top of that, all that bedding on top of the truck, to this place in Sumner. Dad was the driver with his friend, and Sam, I guess, rode in front. And we lived there in Sumner for, oh maybe, less than a year. And from there we moved to Vashon Island.

AL: Why did your father move to Sumner?

EO: From there, he had, apparently had some kind of a work opportunity. I remember the place we moved to, was a little single story house. It was across the road from the Fleishman's yeast factory. It was a long tan brick building, was the Fleishman's yeast... it was a large open air green space in front of it, and a kind of a depression before that. But that, I remember that, the Fleishman's yeast factory.

AL: So he closed his photo studio?

EO: Yes, 'cause there was no more business. Nothing to do, so... had to go out and make money, farm, eat, anyway.

AL: And how did, how did he end up on Vashon Island?

EO: Well, apparently he... well, he had gone there... maybe we had made some friends, or he had made some friend. And there was opportunity to take over some farmland or to do some farming there. So, because of that, we moved from Sumner over to Vashon Island. I remember arriving there. We arrived there one evening in a city park that was called Burton, B-U-R-T-O-N. And it was up on this little road uphill from the town of Burton, uphill from the elementary school. And we arrived there at night and I remember some friends of Dad's coming over, that lived on the island, to help us unload. Unload in this older two-story house. And there were some pear trees there. And it was in the fall, or late summer, and so a lot of the pears had fallen, it was on the ground. And some were still good so we were able to eat some of them. And I remember those pears being very delicious. That's what I remember about that place. [Laughs]

AL: Did you go to Japanese language school as a boy?

EO: We didn't, we did not. We didn't have access to one. But Dad would teach us some Japanese and he did this by reading out of Japanese elementary school books that he bought for us to study. But that didn't last long. On a farm, we were too busy taking care of the farm, so studies kind of went by the wayside.

AL: What were you farming?

EO: A lot of peas was the main thing, and berries of all kinds. I remember strawberries. We raised boysenberries, we raised blackberries, raspberries. And then aside from the peas, we would raise, one year we raised a lot of turnips. And that's what we kind of raised.

AL: Did your father own the farm or was he leasing the farm?

EO: He was leasing. He was unable to own because he was an alien, and also he didn't have enough finances to buy one, which he probably would have done in my name because I was an American-born citizen.

AL: How big was the farm?

EO: We had various different acreages. Where we lived on Vashon, we had everything from about 3 acres on up to about 10 acres of farm. The farm would be like 20 acres, 10 acres would be in pasture.