<Begin Segment 14>

RP: Did you start up your business again, or did you work...

TI: The same business. Except I rented a piece of property over on Sawtelle Boulevard and built up a little tin building on there to house our tools, and I did my work over there. And I was so busy over there, it took all my time. I couldn't do anything else. All these people there, Japanese people returning here, bought cars and pickup trucks, pretty junky, 'cause they didn't have any money either. And they had to fix 'em so they could drive. I fixed 'em and they said they'd pay me later. What else could I do? So I wasn't even getting any money hardly. But I stayed into it. Got busier and busier and had to hire people. It was all right.

[Interruption]

TI: Well, the reason why, the reason why I got into the racing business, before the war, I got into the hot rod business. You know, racing cars up to the dry lakes and stuff, besides my ordinary repairs. And so I made a lot of friends that way who helped me get out of camp to begin with.

RP: Oh, you did?

TI: They wrote letters to "General Nitwit" up there in San Francisco, and told him, "You got no business holding that man in camp." And these were all friends of mine that I knew before the war. And when they found out that I'd come back, they all came to see me. And before you know, it, I was in the hot rod business all over again. And we started building racecars, and I got into racing, and that's that.

RP: Uh-huh. Where were these dry lakes? Up in the Mojave area?

TI: Up in the Mojave area.

RP: Rosamond...

TI: Rosamond, yeah. That's where we went.

RP: Now there's a speedway up there.

TI: Oh, is that right?

RP: Yeah. I think it's called Willow Springs Raceway.

TI: Oh, yeah, that's right.

RP: So you started something up there.

TI: Yeah, that's right. I remember Willow Springs now.

RP: What type of racing cars were these?

TI: Well, we started out with roadsters, roadsters, hopped up roadsters, taking the fenders off of 'em and all that, and racing 'em on the street. And after the war, naturally, racing on the street with no fenders, that was not too good either. But they ended up doing all this drag racing and stuff like that, which we went on into that also, drag racing. And then I got into midget racing, racing midgets. And boy, that was a lot of fun, we didn't all kinds of racing like that.

RP: Now, did you, were you the guy who actually raced the cars, or did you, did you have other drivers?

TI: Yeah, we had drivers.

RP: So you kind of provided the, sort of a pit crew type of...

TI: Yeah, yeah.

RP: ...maintenance.

TI: Taking care of the cars.

RP: That's neat.

TI: I did a few laps, but on my own car I had. I didn't like my wife to know about it.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.