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MR: After the war, the family was still doing gardening, did you continue with that for a long time yourself or --

MB: What do you mean, our former place where we had the farm?

MR: Where you had the farm?

MB: Uh-huh. Well, in 1933, we moved from one side of the boulevard to the other side, and we continued to farm, we had 13 acres of farm then. We continued with the farming for another two years, but we had a greenhouse built, and we were selling these plants. Mama's dream that to sell plants finally, you know, we were selling plants. And it got to the point where the greenhouse and the market was taking all our time, and we couldn't farm also, so we gave up all the farms. And, yeah. Oh, when we lived across the road in 19, oh, when my brother was thirteen years old, he built the first fruit stand on Columbia Boulevard. It was small. It was only six feet wide by eight feet long. And to conserve money, you know, save lumber, he built it in such a way that during the daytime, you could put the walls down, walls down to form a table and display the produce there, and the door was hinged so that it could come off, and you could make another table for displaying produce. And at night, brought the walls up, and you had a closed building. And for electricity, our landlord, Mr. Charles Sunderland, let us run extension cord from his front porch to the market. Oh, something else I should add in there. When my brother was fifteen years old and could drive when we still lived there on that first place, Mama raised in addition to tomatoes and cucumbers and strawberries and pears, she raised cabbage, cauliflower, and peas. Now these are things that have to be sold today. You can't keep them over, and he used to take them to the early morning market. He used to take everything to sell it to early morning market that opened at three in the morning. That meant he had to get up at two-thirty and be there before three, so he could be the first one to get inside the market to get a choice spot. By six o'clock, he'd be home after selling everything. From six to eight, he did his homework, his studies, and then he went to school. He'd be home at three, did I tell this before? Anyway, from three to five, he slept, and then he helped Mama outside and came in at nine, and it would be about ten-thirty before he got to bed, so he was getting six hours rest a night, but he never complained because he knew that it had to be done. And if he didn't do it, no one else would. And not only did he help Mama in that way, he also took over the chore of keeping us kids in line. He'd scold us or spank us or whatever. I mean I would get scolded. My sister Orga was never scolded because she was slow in the head, but he gave a lot. And then he knew that Mama couldn't afford toys for us, and so he made toys for us. The first toy he made was a kite.

Down by the river, willow trees grew, so he used the branches for the spines of the kite, got newspaper from the Sunderlands for the body, and we had lots of twine because we had peas to be strung up, and we could, we'd have the best kite. And since we lived on the side hill and the wind would catch the kite, our kite because it's seen from miles away. Then the yo-yo came, was a fad. We couldn't afford the ten cents for a yo-yo, fifteen cents for a yo-yo, so my brother ransacked my mother's sewing kit. He got two empty spools, and with a pencil whittled just right, he could join the two spools, and we always had twine, and so then we had a yo-yo, and it was our favorite yo-yo. My sister and I, we'd be so glad we took the yo-yo to school, you know, and all the kids would laugh at us because we had this funny yo-yo, but we didn't care. We had a yo-yo. And we had things that other kids, like wintertime. Since we lived on the side hill, they could come and slide down the hill, and they'd have their fancy store bought sleds that could slide down the hill, and my brother and my sister and I, we used lumber, we used different things, but, you know, they don't slide so good, and so he made us a sled. He made a sled. But instead of six inches off the ground like everyone else's, it was only two inches off the ground, and it was wood, you know, and it didn't slide so well. Mr. Sunderland got some metal from someplace, metal stripping, and my brother put that for a runner. We had the best sled. It slid down the hill the fastest, and we had the best sled. And in wintertimes, the fields would puddle up, and it would be ice all over, and people used to come and skate on the ice, and everybody had their skates. We never had skates. We'd slide around on our shoes and didn't do so good, and Mr. Sunderland brought some tin cans. He says, "If you stomp down on the tin can, the can would coil around your shoes, and you could skate that way." So my brother and Orga and I was down there ice skating, and people laughed and laughed at us, our skates. Everybody else had nice, store bought skates, and here we had tin cans. But you know what, you know, before long, everybody was skating around in the tin cans. [Laughs]

MR: It sounds like fun.

MB: Uh-huh. And my brother was real, my brother was just like a father to us. He was real good to us, and I'm sorry that he never got married. If we knew back then what I found out in 1983, my brother would have been married. But my, none of the girls that my brother wanted to marry, Mama thought that she wasn't good enough for him, so he never remarried, I mean he never married, and so he never had children. And because he never had children, the Shoji name would die out. That's why I bought Portland Taiko that drum, that thirty-two-inch taiko. I made a proposition, they wanted a large taiko. I said, "If you would put my brother's name on the outside of the taiko to be left there permanently, I'll buy you a taiko that you want," and they agreed, so that's why the Portland Taiko has that drum or that taiko. And so now, his name will be before the Japanese for as long as that drum is around.

MR: That's a nice gift.

MB: Yes, it is. It carries, I don't know if you could say it carries the family's name but at least people remember the Shoji family.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.