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RP: Tell us, you mentioned there was a community of Japanese farmers in the area that you lived and your father farmed, can you kind of give us a little picture of, of that community?

YW: Okay. The area I'm describing is the Johnson Ranch area on the north side of El Segundo Boulevard and east of Crenshaw, west of Western, south of... what's the name of that street over there? The next street over from El Segundo is, gosh... good heavens, I just drove right down that road this morning, can't remember it. Anyway, that was the Johnson Ranch, and the Japanese farmers would lease land and do their farming. My dad was one of the few people that grew flowers. The rest of 'em were growing vegetables, so we didn't have too much in common that way. Now, you ask yourself how do the farmers irrigate their land, 'cause this is all open land. Well, water for the home was piped in by the water company, but water for farming was a separate thing. What they did is everybody had a reservoir and you would buy water by the hour, so you'd stop the guy who's running around the farms turning on the faucet to fill the reservoirs, and my job was to go find this guy when he's on the road. He said, "Today's Tuesday. He should be around there somewhere." My dad would say, "Go find him and tell him Wakamiya needs some water this week," so I'd, I would hail this guy down and I'd say my father says he wants so many hours of water today. So the guy says, write it down in his book, pretty soon you see him going and opening the water gates, turn the water on for two hours. And that's how we paid for water, two hours worth of water.

RP: You also had another job. You, you would turn on the pumps in the pump house?

YW: Yes, my dad, in order to water you can't just use the water from the reservoir as it is. It has to be under pressure. So he installed a water pump that would draw water from the reservoir and run it out so that it would be under pressure, and my job was to turn that pump on, whenever he wanted the water. There's no point in leaving the pump on forever, so he'd say, he'd tell me, "Today we're gonna water, so I need for you to help me turn the water on and off." So that was my job. He said, "Okay, turn it on," so I'd go running over there and turn the water pump on. And then a few hours later he says, "Okay, time to turn it off," and I go turn it off. So that was my simple job as a seven-, eight-year-old.

RP: We were talking a little bit, last time we talked you talked a little bit about the operation, how hard your dad worked. Sometimes he'd work into the night and...

YW: Yes.

RP: Maybe you can discuss a little bit about the sorting of the carnations and how he prepared them?

YW: Yes, okay. Carnation growing is a very intensive kind of (...) flowers to grow. In the field you have to do the following. As a small plant it's okay, but as, as the carnation starts growing you have to keep 'em isolated into boxes of wires, if you will, so that it would grow straight. Otherwise it would flip over. So what he would do is run, like, he would make wire clotheslines at different levels, and the width of the, width of the plot would be, each bed would be about three or four feet, and he would run wires the length of the, of the plot, and a typical plot would be maybe twenty-five, thirty feet. And he'd string up wires this way. Now that's, takes care of that dimension. Now, this way they'd put strings on, so he'd grab string, he'd tie the string at this end, wrap it up and someone else would tie it at the other end. So you had thousands of strings keeping the flowers contained. Okay? Now that's the first part. Once the flowers start growing, the plants start growing, you have to disbud carnations to maintain only the main bud on each plant. There'd be several stalks coming up, you disbud the side buds and maintain only the main bud, and that way you get the big flowers. So every week you've got to do that because the flowers don't quit growing, so my mom and my dad and some helpers they hired would be involved in this activity. And it just goes on and on. And now, this is during the day. Now, at night, once he's got the flowers picked, he goes into the garage where he had a special processing area that he laid out in the garage and he would sort the flowers out according to size, and grade A, B, C, and he would get 'em all to a uniform length, cut 'em off at a uniform length. And oftentimes the carnation is a flower that would burst its bud, so the, to put the flowers back into the bud he would pin it back in with small wire clamps, if you will, and so if you look at your flowers that you buy from the nursery, from the florists sometimes you may find little pins holding back the carnation buds, 'cause they would burst open and burst the bud. Well, you can't throw those away. That's good flowers except for the fact that it burst its seams, right? So he would do this 'til maybe twelve, one o'clock in the morning. Then he'd go to sleep, Mom would go to sleep, he'd wake up at two or three o'clock in the morning. He only had two or three hours of sleep. And every other day he'd ship, go to L.A. flower market and he rented a stall in the flower market and he would sell from his stall, and the people he would normally sell to are the shippers that want to ship the flowers back East and the local florists that are pretty big, that have a big shop. They would come by these people's stands and look at what they have and they would buy his flowers. And he says, "Fortunately, I had good flowers, so I sold out most of my flowers every day," every time he went up there. He was very successful, he was very well taught and very well learned the craft, from Mr. Satow and those people, he worked hard at keepin' his crops going well.

RP: There was a climatic event that occurred, I think it was, you mentioned 1940, '41, when there was a severe freeze that hit that area.

YW: Oh, yeah, he (deliberately selected) the slope of that hill and turns out one year there was a bad, big frost and the frost rolled down the hills. All the people at the bottom of the hill got their crops wiped out 'cause it was too cold. He was lucky. He was up on top of the slopes. He said he went to market that day and made a killing, because he had flowers that were in shape. The other people couldn't bring flowers 'cause their flowers got frosted out. He came home and said, "Boy, did I make a killing today," so he says, "A few more of those and we can retire." [Laughs] But he knew what he was doing. He knew the weather in that area and he, he was very careful what he did and when he invested his money in that ranch he knew exactly what he was doing. By the way, as a kid I learned what Bank of America was all about. That's where he banked in Hawthorne. I used to accompany him to the bank teller. The bank teller says, "Who's this?" He says, "The next farmer." [Laughs] And he deposited his money, and I was wondering what he was doing, he says, "I'm loaning them my money," he says. So I learned banking at a young age.

RP: So if it wasn't for the war, Yo, you probably would've been a flower farmer.

YW: Right. I was telling my wife that the other day, if it wasn't for the war I would have probably ended up farming. 'Cause it was a good living. Hard living, but a good living. You could make good money with it. If you have a little luck going your side and you do know, you did what you were supposed to be doing, you could make good money. Yeah.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.