Densho Digital Archive - Osamu Mori Interview (denshovh-mosamu-01-0019)

<Begin Segment 19>

RP: When did you leave Tule Lake, Sam?

OM: Sometime in December, late December of '45. So it was after, quite a bit after the war had ended.

RP: Before we get into that, do you recall anything about that day the war ended?

OM: No, not really. I know my dad had talked to us, I think he had to talked to us about what we were going to do. We're going to go to LA and it came about just the way he said it would. We're going to spend three days in LA and then the contact is going to pick us up and we're going to go to Fresno and temporarily do certain thing. And then in the meantime he had, I guess, arranged almost to be a tenant farmer, like, on a fig ranch. I guess like a foreman, he was going to get paid so much and then we're going to provide the physical labor for what we can do on weekends and this and that. And we stayed there... but anyway I don't recall any special event. We got on a train I think to L.A. and, you know, arrived at the grand or whatever, that union station, I guess it is. And I think we walked from there to Koyasan, which is probably within a mile.

RP: And you stayed there three days and then went to --

OM: And then the two people that my dad knew from long time, they're from Mie-ken, from Japan, they picked us up and we went to Fresno to a farm labor camp and stayed there probably two or three months.

RP: And what did you do there?

OM: Well, we were day laborers, pruning, supposed to be a highly skilled operations I guess, but here we were, I mean, sixteen or maybe seventeen years old. My younger brother and my dad and I, we formed a kind of a crew, I guess, and they'd hire us out on a day basis. And we'd go prune fig, I mean, vineyards, you know, vines, grapevines, I'd never seen a grapevine in my life. And here we're, it's supposed to take some skill and you're supposed to cut 'em a certain way. But it was, you know, it was wintertime, we're talking December, late December, and it's cold and it wasn't snowy or frosty, it was just downright cold. And you're out there pruning these vines and every so often, after you cut the vine, the vine would snap back and hit you on the face or whatever. Oh, it was painful. Well, first of all you're not used to the work, coming out of the camp and you don't know what the heck you're doing first of all. But you catch on pretty quickly and... except for damaging a few vines and things like that, I think we did okay. I think I still know how to prune... I don't know how to prune peaches and things like that but grapevines I think I can do.

RP: And you pooled your money together and what did you buy with it?

OM: Well, first of all, we needed transportation, you know. We lived in the labor camp, as long as we lived there, you know, board and food was okay. Transportation was okay to the job sites but once if you wanted to go somewhere, you needed wheels. So that's what we bought, we bought a 900 dollar 1939 Chevrolet. I would imagine that Chevrolet cost maybe half that much, 600 dollars or whatever, brand new, but here we're paying 900 bucks for it, six, seven years after. But it ran good, it was a good little car. It lasted, I don't know, two, three years I guess. It was a nice little car.

RP: Can you describe the conditions, the housing conditions at the labor camp?

OM: It was almost like camp, the beds were just lined up and it's all male, you know, there was no females there, all male. So privacy wasn't that much of a problem but living conditions were pretty tough, I mean, you're living in, it's cot, one after another. But I always felt that it wasn't only for a couple months, temporary, you could put up with that. But it's surprising, even after we left that labor camp, on weekends my dad and my brother, we would take on other jobs on the weekends. We'd go to school on the weekday, on the weekends we'd go out and take on a pruning job or if it was harvest time, we'd take on a apricot picking or whatever and we needed wheels for that. So that's part of the reason why we bought the car when we did, we needed wheels. California, you can't get any place without a car.