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BB: And the total number of years that you were here, and if you could describe some of the other of those first five years. You talked about somewhat the '78 to '83 and the building. So those were the first five years or so, but you were here a number of more years.

CE: Well, seven more. I retired in 1990 because I had become sixty-five, and I was ready to retire. They had asked me if I would stay three more years until the 100th anniversary. And I said, "How about if I return for your 100th anniversary?" and so I retired in '90. And during those years, we had exciting things happened. One of the things we did was we had opportunities. We added cultural touches to what we had built in the building. We had our tokonoma at the entrance way from the beginning, and we had other touches. One of our members made the chandelier that's in the entryway of the church with his own hands. In the sanctuary, we had, and this is probably one of the most obvious touches that we did. We had schoolroom globes hanging from the four lights in the sanctuary body, the nape of the sanctuary. And we talked about, there was a good bit of koden from Minnow Hara's funeral. And talking with the family, we thought, well, maybe we could get some better looking light fixtures. And I found a company, a lighting company, that also did design, and I had forgotten the name of it. It was in Northwest Portland, and I went to them and talked to them about it, and they designed fixtures, and we paid for them in memory of Minnow Hara. And the light fixtures went up, and they are a cultural touch. And we did that sort of thing along the way.

BB: And were things in the chancel added at that time, the shoji and some of the other things or had they been here before?

CE: Well, all of our plans didn't include the chancel. And in the process, actually in the midst of the construction, people began to say, "We can't have a whole new sanctuary and then have a chancel looking like that. What are we going to do?" It had water stained tiles and cellulose tiles on the ceiling, and it really was looking pretty sad. So we sat down and did some sketching, and I proposed that we open the thing up. It was very tight and with a very large pulpit which still, pulpit but an equally large lectern, and they were both pushed into the space of a chapel. There were two pews for choir, and we didn't have a choir. The organ was there. It was very crowded, and so we decided to open it up. And in numbers of Japanese churches at that time, the communion rails were not a straight line. They were in a circle or a square or a rectangle, that sort of thing. So we sort of decided we would try that idea. And the communion rails were actually designed by Jim Onchi, the contractor, and then built professionally, but he designed them and told how they should be done and so forth. And that was a cultural touch added also. We had these shoji style like doors in the space because those used to be doors that came into the chancel. There were four or five doors that came into the chancel area, and we didn't need all those doors, so we filled two of them with the cultural touch there. And redid the back, the wall where the cross is, we did that in a way so that the cross would stand out. We did decide to do the altar differently. We had a very typical traditional church communion table that was large and didn't fit anywhere, so we put it in the entryway and made a memorial table out of it. Underneath the bill booths that, and the bill booth was donated in memory of a family also, family's memory.

[Interruption]

CE: In my second year here, I discovered that Mrs. Chiyo Endo had a history up of this church up until 1948 or actually up until the internment time. And we had a young man named Yoshimi Kamano who was a student at Western Evangelical Seminary that we hired as our translator. And I asked him if he would sit down with Mrs. Endo and translate that into English so that we can see what was in that history. And that's where a big portion of our early history comes from. The next year -- Yoshimi was with us for one year -- and the next year and for the two years following, we had Shinya Maruya who was a student at Western Baptist College, and they were both excellent translators. They were both very helpful persons, and I asked Shinya if he would sit down with the Issei and start a conversation with tape recorder going, and we gleamed a lot of memories from the Issei. And then we asked the Niseis to start participating ideas and so forth, and we began to grow the history in that way. And the history is now up until I think '94 or at least up until the time, my time here, maybe up till '90, so it would be good history to add to.

The other thing that I want to comment on... when I was first here and wondering what this was all about, you know. I've always said if I ever had a call to ministry, I was sure pretty hard of hearing and, but when I was early here, I began to remember clear back to grade school, some forty-five or more years before, and my two best friends in grade school were two Japanese boys who had been sent from Japan to live with their grandparents here, and the grandparents had a truck farm in Spokane, Washington, and those two boys and I always hung around together. They didn't speak a lot of English, but we did, our process was really what we did. We'd eat lunch together. We were all poor. We would bring a bag lunch and peanut butter sandwich or something, and then there was always maybe a couple cookies or some little dessert. And they always ate their dessert first before their sandwich or whatever they had. And I tried to question them about it, but they didn't really I don't think understand why, what I was curious about and so forth. So I just grew up thinking that was Japanese tradition to always eat your dessert first.

I remember also thirty years before when the Japanese people were coming back from the camps and reading in the newspaper the incredibly terrible discrimination that was happening to them as they came back to their communities, and I knew nothing about the Japanese people or the community or anything at that time. I was just barely out of college. But when I would read it, I would think, "How can people be that way?" I mean how can humans treat other humans that way and just being appalled to all those memories came back in those weeks where I was struggling to, trying to decide what I, whether I would stay here or what I would do. So I had kind of wanted to be sure I mentioned those.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.