<Begin Segment 8>

RP: Menlo Park, was it typically kind of a rural farming area at that time?

KO: Oh, yeah. I think it made, I think Inyokern, in the present legal, the Inyokern, I think, is probably, might be a little bigger town than Menlo Park was, in terms of population. But it was, essentially, it was essentially a suburban town where the people who worked for the rich people that had property around there, in the Atherton area, lot of people in Atherton, that area there.

RP: So Menlo Park was kind of a service community providing help, domestics...

KO: Yeah, service community. Grocery stores and other kind of stores, and then movie theater, things of that sort.

RP: Yeah, so you would go down there for a little entertainment, watch movies. Were there other Japanese stores, or any Japanese stores in the community?

KO: There was a Japanese community, small community in Mountain View. I think one or two blocks off of Main Street, Main Street, to the south of Main Street, I think it was about one block, two blocks. There was a very short, short block of stores, and a Japanese store with Japanese goods and stuff. That was about it. And so every now and then, we'd go down there and get the supplies and stuff.

RP: Is that where you got your rice?

KO: Yeah. Well, rice, yeah, we'd get sacks of rice there, in the bulk quantity. The kind that was favored by the Oriental community. Because we couldn't get the rice in the regular grocery stores. Let's see. One of the... I'm trying to remember whether we had a family that lived near us or across the street from us or somewhere nearby, owned a grocery store in Menlo Park. In fact, it was about the biggest grocery store there. And they supplied this stuff for all the property-owning families. And so, essentially, their store was a, what you might call, almost call a pre-supermarket supermarket. [Laughs] And they would deliver week's, two weeks' worth of supplies, and the phone orders would come in, and they would put the order together and deliver the thing to the various estates. Well, they had a fairly good business there. It was that convenient 'cause they had all sorts of interesting stuff there, too, not just the mom & pop type stuff. But it was a mom & pop store, but it was a bigger one. So they had all sorts of up to date stuff.

RP: Any particular food that you remember taking a liking to?

KO: Me?

RP: Yeah.

KO: I like almost any kind of food. My favorite food was hamburger. [Laughs] And the interesting thing about hamburger, I have a tendency to react to slightly spoiled beef. If the beef is overage, I tend to break out in hives. But it has to be fairly old, but I learned the hard way and my family learned the hard way. The beef of that period which wasn't refrigerated properly, I would react almost immediately to it, and I kept busting out in hives. So whenever we bought any kind of beef, we had to be sure that it was fresh beef. And hamburger was the same way. We were able to buy things, the steak kind of cut and stuff, roasts and stuff, because they would come from fairly fresh chunks of beef that would be delivered during, early during the week, Monday or Tuesday, and we would get our beef then. We had an icebox we could stick those in a day or two before they spoiled to the point where I couldn't eat it. But we had to be very careful with hamburger. They used to use all scraps of stuff in making hamburgers on those days, and you could never know how old the beef was that went into hamburgers. So whenever we had hamburgers, which was, unfortunately, which was my favorite food, beef. [Laughs] We had to have our hamburgers ground from a steak, round steak was cheap in those days. So we'd buy it, round steak, and have it ground, and I was able to eat that without any trouble. But I didn't dare, we didn't dare buy any pre-ground hamburgers 'cause we never knew what was in it. We tried that a couple times and I broke out like crazy. So we wound up eating hamburger steak. Fresh hamburger, I still like fresh hamburger. But this was in the days when the butcher stores didn't have much in the way of refrigeration. In fact, it was old ice box and stuff, so we had to be careful. But it turns out that chicken and pork didn't bother me. So I developed a liking for pork chops and pork roasts and stuff like that. And visiting my cousins and aunt in Stockton, they had a store on one of the street, side, main street or side street, whatever it was. And there was a restaurant across the street from them who featured pork roast. So every time we go there, I would have a pork roast. Slices of roast, roast pork and rice, pork gravy and stuff like that. [Laughs] 'Cause we didn't have much in the way of pork at home except an occasional pork chop, 'cause every time, or about once a month, we'd go to Sacramento or something like that -- not Sacramento, Stockton, and I'd have my fill of pork roast. Roast pork, sliced roast pork with gravy, and that was great.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.