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MR: How many years did you spend in Japan, and when did you come back?

MB: Okay. I went in the fall of '36. I turned seventeen that year, that fall, so I went to Japan in November, my mother couldn't take me sooner because we had the market, and she needed to help in the market. And after in the wintertime when the business is slow, she could be gone, so she took me in November of '37, and I came back in December of '40, 1940, so I was in Japan three years and one month, and I could tell you things about that later.

MR: And then your health must have improved because I see you're still here with us.

MB: Well, yes. The doctor, I knew the name of the heart specialist back then, I've forgotten it now. But you know, I read about his obituary, you know, when he died, and it kind of tickled me. He told me I had two years to, less than two years to live and here I lived, and I'm still living and he died. Yeah, I should have been dead in 1939, 1938, here I am yet.

MR: When you were in Japan and you were in school, it was about the time that Japan was at war with China. Were the students told anything about that war?

MB: No, no. There were many students in my school from Korea, I mean, their parents were Japanese, and they worked in Korea, and their children came to school. And I never could understand it, but the children from Korea were shunned. I mean, they weren't welcomed by the Japanese, and I never understood why, maybe it was during the war, I don't know. I don't know too many things. I was young, but I was still a kid. I never, wasn't interested in history or war or anything. I just enjoyed myself.

MR: So when you came back then to the U.S., then what course did you take? What did you do after you returned?

MB: After I returned, what do you mean by course?

MR: In December 1940 when you returned, did you, you mentioned earlier that you finished school?

MB: Yes. I had, I was taking the college preparatory course. And to graduate that, I had to have thirty-two credits plus two more which made it thirty-four credits. And since I had left in November and I didn't finish my senior year, I went back to finish it. And I found out that I had almost enough credits, I was only two, one or two credits short, and my grades were such that I wouldn't have had to go back to high school, but I didn't know it, so I did go back to high school. And if I had stayed in America and graduated high school back then, I would have been the youngest one in my class.

MR: So then, what year did you graduate from high school?

MB: 1938, yeah 1938. And then from there, I went to college, and I wanted to study nursing. Math was easy for me. I wanted to be an accountant. My mother, our mother thwarted, T-H-W-A-R-T-E-D, thwarted all three of us kids. May wanted to be a lawyer. She graduated number one in her class, and she got a four-year all-tuition paid scholarship to attend Reed College in Portland to study law. Mama said, "No. No daughter of mine is going to shame me and do a man's profession. You will get married." She had a boyfriend who wanted to marry her. "You will get married and give me grandkids." My sister said, "If I can't study law, I'm not going to get married," and she never did. She relented years later, but she had told this to Mama. So as long as Mama was married, she wasn't going to get married, or long as Mama was alive, May wasn't going to get married. Well, she never did get married, but she had a lot of chances because she was smart and pretty, and she had many suitors. George was also smart in his class. And since we had the greenhouse, he thought he would like to go to college to learn horticulture, and my mother said, "No. You're not going to go to college." She says, "Experience is the best teacher. You'll stay here and learn in that way." Well, when having your own greenhouse and working it, you learn, but you don't learn every phase of it, and so he left home since Mama wouldn't go to college, my mama wouldn't let him go to college. He traveled around the country and went to schools to learn like one nursery he worked at raised plants that didn't have flowers, you know, ferns and things. Another greenhouse he worked at raised cut flowers or cactus or whatever, and he learned in this way. And wherever he worked, his employers treated him badly. None of them would pay him more than minimum wage. He, and he knew that he was the best worker in these places. And this one place, he wanted more wage, and he asked his boss to raise his wage, and his boss says, "Well, come next time I raise wages, I'll raise your wages." Every six months, he raised wages, but he never raised my brother's wages. And so the last year he worked, he thought, my brother thought, "Well, I'm going to quit at just the right time." He knew when flowers would be ready to sell. This was a cut flower nursery, and he knew when to dim the lights so the plants would think they were sleeping, and he knew when to give it lights so they could grow or whatever. He knew when to water them. And this green houseman had three college men, and my brother said the college men didn't know anything because they'd come and ask him, "Now what do we do? Now what do we do?" and he'd tell them, and they'd do it. And so when he, so six weeks before he quit, six weeks before he told his boss, "I'm giving you three weeks' notice," and he left so that three weeks was critical before, you know, you cut the flowers, and he didn't want to be there to do whatever needed to be done, and he knew the college men didn't know, and this would hurt the nurseryman the most, so that's what he did. That, the nurseryman was, I didn't know it then, back then, but the nurseryman belonged to a blue book, you know, in the country that lists top grower, second grower, and so forth, and they list, I forgot how many top grower, forty-five top growers or something, and this nurseryman was number... I forgot, fifteen or sixteen when my brother went to work with him, work for him, and my brother was there three years. He went from number sixteen to number five to number three and then to number two. Well that year, the nursery man didn't have any cut flowers. Nothing was ready. He lost his crop, and the men he had didn't know how to take care of plants, and he never even made it into the blue book. And two years after my brother left him and was in another state, his ex-boss came to work for him, begged him to work for him, said, "I'll pay you whatever you want." And my brother said, "You always promised to raise my wages. You never did. What makes you think that I believe you now?" so he never worked for him anymore. I mean, the nurseryman, it took him quite a few years before he even made it into the blue book again, but I hope he learned that you don't treat someone badly just because he's not one of you.

[Interruption]

MR: You were talking about, earlier about times being hard, and so you were also mentioning going to the bakery, getting bread?

MB: Well, there were two grocery stores. One grocery store, Yost grocery store, was one block away from us, and this is where we used to go to buy bread or whatever in the early years. But Mrs. Yost would look at Orga and me, and she'd say, "Go home and wash up," and she wouldn't let us back into the store until we were clean or we got tired of being chased out of the store every time. Thompson's grocery store was five blocks away, so we started going to Thompson's. And bread back then was ten cents a loaf, and a double loaf, two loaves of bread baked side by side, was fifteen cents, so Mr. Thompson would separate the loaves of bread and sell us the bread for eight cents. His wife, Mrs. Thompson, would be very angry at him because she said he should sell it for ten cents a loaf, and here he was giving it to us for eight cents. We didn't buy very many things at the grocery store besides bread because Mama just didn't have the money. She sent Orga and I on a lot of errands. And for running these errands, about once a month, she gave us a penny. That penny bought us a, we'd go to Thompson's because Mr. Thompson was real good to us. They had four for a penny, three for a penny, two for a penny, or a one cent candy. We tried all of them at different times and decided that we like the penny sucker the best. And the sucker, the only way I could tell you what it was like is like the Butterfinger bars we have today, that on a stick would be about inch square, you know, and that was a penny. I'd take a lick. I'd hand it to my sister, Orga. She'd take a lick; I'd take a lick; she'd take a lick. And when it was almost gone, I'd hand it back to her, and she would finish it, and that made her real happy.

My sister, Mrs. Sunderland, our landlady, went to many activities and functions, and Mr. Sunderland, a farmer, never went with her. And not wanting to go alone, she took my sister, May, with her, and May and Mrs. Sunderland went different places, and one place they went was to the Oregon Woodlawn, Woodlawn Methodist Church. Orga and I went one Christmas. We thought it would be fun if we went. They never let us into the church, but we thought we'd play around the building until they came out. Well, the stores were two blocks away, so we walked down there. There was the, the Fire Hall was there, hardware store, drug store, and other stores, and then we found the bakery. And when we were peeking in the window at the bakery and looking at all the pretty things in the window, I realized that bread was seven cents a loaf. Thompson's one, eight cents a loaf, and here it was seven cents a loaf, and day old bread was six cents a loaf. So thereafter, we went to Thompson's to buy our bread. All we bought was the bread. And once in a blue moon when Mama had the money, she would let us get day old pastry. My favorite was the tea stick, and it sold for five cents each, six for a quarter. But on sale, it'd be three for ten cents, and so Mama would give me twenty cents to buy six of them because, but that wasn't very often. But every time we went, Mr. Mondeli always had cookies for her, something to give to Orga and I. One day, he didn't have anything, and I guess we looked, didn't look very happy, so he turned on his heels and went into the back room, and I wondered what he was going to do. I watched him, and he went to a rack where donuts had just come out of the oven. He took his fists and, fist and pressed into a doughnut, and then he came out with two halves, one each for my sister and myself. There, everything in the store went down in prices at six o'clock like the seven cents fresh bread at six o'clock dropped off to six cents. And around about five o'clock, all these people would gather in the store either waiting for the price to drop, this one day, it was a little after five, but it was crowding up outside, and Mr. Mondeli came over to me and told me to follow him, so I went with him. We went into the back room, and he got me a loaf of bread, a day old loaf of bread, and then he stuffed the bag with everything, and then we both walked out to the front, and I held out my hand, and he took his six cents for the loaf of bread, and then he pushed us out the door, and he gave me the bag and said, "Run along now, don't let, before it starts to rain," so we ran out of the store. And when we got about two blocks away, we were getting curious to see what was in the bag, so we opened up the bag and looked. There was our loaf of bread that we wanted, and the bag filled up with maple bars, doughnuts, all the stale pastries, and he did this all the time. When I was in the seventh grade, he died. And after that, we never got any more free pastries to eat, but he was also my angel. He knew that Mama couldn't afford much for us. And not wanting to see us, you know, wanting things and never getting, he just gave them to us just like that lady at the lunchroom had given us those crackers. I guess that's it.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.