Densho Digital Archive - George Matsumoto Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 5>

KP: So you're growing up in your family, sounds like your father needed English language skills and probably... did he speak --

GM: Yes. He was self-taught, and even while he was moving from one city to the other, different farms, he had this suitcase and he had a dictionary and he could read the newspaper (with) no problem.

KP: What language did you speak at home?

GM: We spoke Japanese, but the kids sometimes responded in English.

KP: What about your mother? What did she speak?

GM: Yeah, she spoke Japanese. Knew some English. She worked for a Jewish family in San Francisco and they were kosher, so she cooked for them and they had to keep their dishes and pots separate, meat in one and fish and fowl in another. So she learned to cook Jewish dishes, so she liked lox and stuffed cabbage with hamburger and all kinds of things, spaghetti and... so these kinds of things that she learned, and she was quite good at cooking these things.

KP: What was your, in Ocean Park, what was your community made up of? Caucasian?

GM: (There were) very few Japanese. So when we moved from San Francisco where we were in the, well, it was half and half, half Japanese and half Caucasian, but when we moved to Ocean Park there were only about five Japanese families in the whole area. So we lost touch with our Japanese...

KP: Did you continue to, did you go to Japanese language school ever?

GM: No, since I was working most of the time, helping my father even when I was ten years, eight, ten years old, changing those fishnets and things.

KP: Did you participate in any of the Japanese holidays, your family?

GM: Oh, yeah. My father used to make these mochi, I don't know what you'd call them, cakes, rice cakes. We used to pound them. But we didn't have one of those big crocks like they do in Japan, so my father made one out of soy sauce barrels, and he had to reinforce the bottom because you're pounding, it breaks, so he, he did a lot of things that, at home. We caught fish, mostly mackerel, during the summer, and he would salt them and that's what we ate the whole winter. And I would go... then we had the 1933 earthquake and we were going to school in tents, army tents. So there weren't enough tents, so what they did is they cut the classes in half and there was a part that went in the morning and a part in the afternoon. So if I go into afternoon class, then the morning'd be free, so I used to go fishing and catch the smelt and whatever.

KP: Where did you fish from?

GM: The Ocean Park pier mostly. Sometimes we'd go to Santa Monica pier and, and my father used to give me a penny for each fish and sometimes he'd look at it and say, "No, that's two for a penny. [Laughs] So with that I was able to save enough to buy a bicycle and I bought the best one they had in Montgomery Ward, but it was so heavy. It had one of those kickstands, just like the motorcycle. That was the first -- then it had a tank between the bars, battery for the horn, and it had a rearview mirror. It was the deluxe, but it went through my two brothers. They all used the same bike while we were growing up, and my younger brother, one of 'em left it on the curb one time and a car hit it, so we lost a fender and it never tracked straight after that.

KP: What, how far away from the amusement concession did you live?

GM: Oh, it was only a few blocks, and when we moved to the other one it was only about a block and a half from the ocean, so at night you could hear the waves, very close. So that's where we spent our, our childhood, is on the Ocean Park pier, Santa Monica pier or Venice pier, and they were one mile apart. So that, with very little money during the Depression we used to have a lot of fun, just go down to the beach and all we had was a ball and a bat, a glove, pair of skates, that's about it. So that was the life that we led during the Depression. And my father used to make his own miso, that soy bean paste, and he used to make his own home brew, sake, so we were pretty well set. Then after Prohibition ended... well, even before that, when we were kids, we used to go around back alleys and pick up bottles, and we used to sell 'em to the, there was one place that sold malt, malt and hops. And it was legal to make your own, but you couldn't sell it, during the Depression, and they had bottling equipment and they sold bottles, empty bottles, so we used to sell it to them for, it was penny apiece for pints and sometimes they (would) tell me, "No, we can't buy that. They're worthless." I asked 'em how come, (they) said, "These are bootleg pints, not a full pint." So they were reasonable about it. We just threw 'em away. But gallons, it was like a nickel, so that was a bonanza, sometime we'd find a bottle, a gallon, and then they would use it to buy wine and this kind of thing. So after the Depression, a gallon of wine, you could buy, a gallon was, like, fifty cents. You'd take your own bottle, too. And then they had a big keg and they'd open the spigot.