Densho Digital Archive - Roy Murakami Interview (denshovh-mroy

<Begin Segment 12>

RP: So you, you lived across from the nursery...

RM: Yeah.

RP: ...on Cahuenga. And you were sharing some of, some of the neighbors that you had. You had kind of a diverse little group of...

RM: Oh, yeah.

RP: ...friends and neighbors nearby.

RM: Yeah, next door to me, our house, was Worshans, Worshans, a Jewish family. The mother and father I think was the only one I would see. But they used to have like an old, I guess you call it furnitures and stuff like that. They had old knives, you know, and some, like get rid of something like that, get that. So they had that. And, and then across this side of us we had a bar or eating place. He passed away recent, his family. Then in the other corner there was a drug store, drug store and market. And down the street this way from Worshans there was a chicken, chickens, they used to kill chickens. And they sell 'em from that. And then there was a barbershop and then there was this Henderson's Wrought Iron Works or something like that, that was down the street, too.

RP: Right down the street where you lived, Cahuenga.

RM: Uh-huh, yeah. In fact, when we want to go across the street, we'd call our mother and father, they had, they would be busy... this barber shop guy took us across with our dog. [Laughs] Nice guy.

RP: You said there was a Texan... gentleman from Texas who also lived nearby you?

RM: Oh, that's this bar, cafe, yeah.

RP: Oh, uh-huh. And your, you said that occasionally your mother would sneak on after the war started...

RM: Then they went to the Henderson's. They were, we were planning to go for a couple weeks before, after the war started, they said we were gonna go into camp or something like that. So, but this... when I told you I met George, Willy George, he had this fur company but he was Indian and he had a reservation, part of reservation in Las Vegas. So he wanted us to move there and farm for him. But my father and my uncles went there, mother, and they looked at the place and "No," can't do it because up, up the area right close to it was the Blue Diamond Mine which is some kind of a special kind of material they used in the war.

RP: Gypsum?

RM: No, not Gypsum.

KP: Magnesium.

RP: Oh, magnesium.

RM: Magnesium, yeah.

RP: Okay. Ah, so you would have --

RM: So we never... Father come back and says, "Well, we're going to Manzanar, we have to go to Manzanar." So we went back. But that, they were preparing that.

RP: That was a plan to go to...

KP: And why couldn't they go work for them? Because of the Blue Diamond Mine?

RM: Yeah.

RP: 'Cause it was this --

RM: Well, you know this war, strategic war material --

RP: -- industry.

KP: So they said no Japanese there?

RM: That they, we didn't want to go there. You know, if something happened there they would blame us on it.

RP: Sabotage. Yeah, you would have been the first ones... part of the war hysteria of the time.

RM: Yeah, but maybe I would have been in Vegas. [Laughs]

RP: There would have been a Vegas dojo.

KP: It would have been kind of like your grandfather in Reno.

RM: [Laughs] Yeah.

RP: Yeah. [Laughs] Well, that's really interesting that there was a possibility of you leaving the area and not going to Manzanar. But...

RM: Well, for a while this Willy George was a, he had proposed all these things. He got all these contacts, so...

RP: Uh-huh. So he was trying to help you out.

RM: Yeah, he was a friend of my father's a long time, I guess. In fact, we worked for him after the war for a while.

RP: That's right, you were, you were talking about your father's connections and that there was a gentleman, a gentleman from Tuluca Lake, was it?

RM: Yeah.

RP: Who used to... what did he do?

RM: He invented diesel oil. It's a product they used to use quite a bit in the can, little cans. I guess it was like the ones nowadays you put in, pour it in engine. Something like that anyway.

RP: Was it like Three-in-one oil? Or...

RM: Yeah, something like that. And he, he and my father was long time friends, too. So when we came out, he gave him his mower, first mower, power mower that I seen. It was a Sears, I think it was. And he gave him some tools and he said, "Sego, you go out and be a gardener for a while." He says, "here." And we did gardening. He got this old truck from the guy that lived next door, Kassie, was the one who was the bar. He had a little old truck that he didn't need. It was a two, '31, cut down, did it, put a bed in it. And they would use that for two, two years.

RP: Two years?

RM: Yeah. We used to go up all over the place.

RP: We'll talk about that in a little bit.