<Begin Segment 8>

RP: Was your father also in the flower business?

MS: Yes, we had a flower shop. He built a shop there and...

RP: Can you describe the shop to us?

MS: Well, it was, it was a little wooden shop, and had a place for flowers in front and a work place in back and that's where, and that's where I began to really do some of the work in the shop. You had to wash out the pots and the cans and things that we put the flowers in, five gallon cans. He made some special tall vases for the gladiolas because they were so tall. And he used tiles, roof tiles, and the long, very long ones, and put, I guess he cemented in the bottom of one and stood it up. So...

RP: Did you have any refrigeration at, at that time?

MS: No. There was no... or was there refrigeration? I wonder, I wonder if there was a little refrigerator in the back. I know we had a cooler which was... I think we hung some wet gunnysacks and it was in the back, it was a cooler area. Oh, I, yes, I guess we did have a, we did have one refrigerator with a glass door for the roses and some of the orchids or something like that that was special. Yes.

RP: Now did he, did he take regular trips down to the flower market at that point?

MS: Oh, yes, oh, yes. He had to go down every, probably every morning or so. I think he went every morning anyway. And, and that made it difficult for my mother because she had to, I guess she was up, I don't know, it had to be... he left about four-thirty in the morning so... and he... now when I mention the market, I forgot to mention that when we were in, on Los Feliz Boulevard, my father had a motorcycle with a sidecar and he put the flowers in the sidecar. And so he took me down to the market once. It was the first time I had been in the market. But also it was the first time... was that when... it was the first time I ever had pancakes I know, because we had breakfast there. And I was trying to remember if that was the first time I saw people having to dig food out of a garbage can or whether it was when I went down with him in Highland Park, which might have been because that was, well, '30... let's see, I left twenty, about twenty... the Depression must have started around, between there because at one of those times... and that's when I became aware of, of the Depression is when I went to market with him.

RP: How did, how did the Depression affect your family, father's business?

MS: Oh, well of course it hurt everybody. But on the other hand we had, we were very fortunate on York Boulevard in Highland Park, we had a lot of fruit trees. We had a plum tree that just bore and bore and just... and apricot tree, and we had a quince tree and let's see there was another, and we had a cherry tree but it was more of a flowering because it didn't give many cherries. Let's see, what else was there? And we had chickens. We had, he brought, he brought a couple of Bantam chickens from Japan, with a very long tail, the rooster had a long tail, and then the little hen. And they were smaller but they did have eggs. And then every once in a while my mother would have to kill one and I think that was difficult. You chop off the head but it keeps, you know, it keeps moving around. Then you had to pluck all the feathers and you clean it all and do everything. And we grew vegetables. So we were pretty self-sufficient in terms of that. But we did go down to get Japanese food, soy sauce and...

RP: Rice?

MS: I know he made tofu a couple of times but the rest of the time...

RP: Where would you go to pick up Japanese food?

MS: Oh in Japanese town.

RP: Little Tokyo?

MS: Yeah, Little Tokyo.

RP: What do you remember about some of those trips down there?

MS: No, he didn't take me there very much. Japanese town I only learned through when I got to, well into high school and wanted to meet some boys in a sense, and so I went to the Japanese church and... yes, because after, after the junior high school I went to the high school, Franklin high school. As I say, more and more, and it's mostly apparently Latino now, the whole neighborhood. So the high school, the, yes...

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.