<Begin Segment 14>

MH: When you were growing up, there must have been some kind of routine you did on the farm. Tell me, you know, what it was like a daily day type of thing on the farm?

EF: No two days were alike. In other words, no two days were alike, so you didn't know what to expect, so that's the way farm life was. It all depends on your chores you did. Chores were different every day. One day you're taking care of the chickens, and the next day you were taking care of the pigs, so there was a lot of difference. And we had four teams of horses on the farm, which was quite a few teams of horses. My father was a good horseman, so he could handle them. But back in those days when we didn't have the tractors, there was a big workhorse. That was part of farming. And as I said, my father was good in handling horses.

MH: Did your mom get up in the morning and stoke the fire and do all that kind of stuff?

EF: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

MH: She had breakfast ready for all of you?

EF: All of us, you bet she did and, you know, variety. I can't believe the variety that she was able to come up with. I mean, heck, hey we didn't live, we lived frugally, but the variety she was able to put together was amazing. You know, you could hardly walk away from the table without having your stomach full.

MH: Give me an example of what one day would have been like for you. When you got up in the morning, your mom had breakfast ready for you, then what if you weren't going to school on that particular day?

EF: Oh, we knew what chores we had to do and where we were going to do the job on the farm.

MH: What kind of chore would you have first thing in the morning?

EF: Well, especially if you got horses and cows, the stalls had to be cleaned out and those kind of things, those kind of chores. It took quite a bit of time, usually took two or three hours to get that done. We had quite a few cows in those days so have them being milked and fed and those kind of things plus being cleaned up was --

MH: Did you ever milk the cows?

EF: No, I didn't ever milk the cows.

MH: Who did that usually?

EF: No, it wasn't me. Somebody else did it. I thought my sisters did that, you know that? I thought they were the ones who milked the cows, but I never. I got to admit, I never milked a cow.

MH: Did your father, was he the only one who actually used the horses to plow, etcetera. or were your boys able to do that too?

EF: No. We always had hired help to work the horses. We had people, you know, hired that were able to, were good at that. My father was too busy with everything else, but he always had people that could run those horses.

MH: Who did the planting?

EF: My father. Yeah, my father did the planting.

MH: Did you ever have to irrigate water?

EF: Oh, yes, we irrigated, oh, yeah.

MH: Did you help with that?

EF: Oh, yeah. It wasn't so much helping my dad. We were probably the ones that did the major part of the work like moving the pipes and those things.

MH: So where did the water come from?

EF: We had a well. We had a well, yeah, and the place where we had the well. But otherwise, we had ponds that we pumped out of.

MH: When it was harvest time, how did the day start when you really had to get out there and harvest something?

EF: Well, took a lot of people, so you had to be fairly well organized to make sure everybody had a job.

MH: What kind of job?

EF: You know like picking up the, making sure the help was in the right field and those things. And then at the end, they had something to pick the berries into, so there was a lot of management work that had to be taken care of. And if you weren't aware of what was around you, you'd sure be in trouble.

MH: Was school different for farm kids, for you kids, as opposed to maybe the kids who went to city schools?

EF: Well, I think there was a difference in the lifestyle for people who lived in the city and kids who live out in the country. I think they always had plenty of things that they had to do when they got home especially if they lived on the farm. There were no such thing as just coming home and sitting around the table. They all had their chores to do.

MH: Like what kind of chores did you have when you were still in grade school?

EF: Well, if you had chickens and those things, they always had to be fed, and the eggs had to be picked up. And we also had pigs, so they had to be fed, and the horses always had to, stalls had to always be cleaned plus the cows. So as far as work is concerned, it was endless. As far as I was concerned, there just wasn't that much free time. That's what the farm life was all about as far as I'm concerned.

MH: So you went to school, came home, did chores, your mother had dinner ready for you?

EF: Oh, yeah.

MH: And did you have chores after dinner or usually?

EF: No, no, no. We were always done. Yeah, after dinner was free time.

MH: Did you have homework?

EF: Always, we had homework, oh, yeah.

MH: Did your folks help you with homework?

EF: No, not really, not really, not really.

MH: When you were going to high school, did you, you must have been quite a ways from Gresham High School.

EF: Five miles.

MH: How did you get there?

EF: Oh, we had a bus. We rode the bus. And later on during the period of time when I was at, I had to learn how to drive the truck, well, we'd always take the car, you know. Car was available for me to get home early in other words.

MH: When you were growing up, did you have electricity?

EF: Not at the start.

MH: Not at the start.

EF: No, not at the start.

MH: How old do you think you were when you got the electricity?

EF: I think I was almost a freshman in high school when it first, before the first power. We had electricity at the house, and I could still remember them putting that in. I think I can still remember them putting those, you know, they had no code back in those days I don't think. They seem like they just, whatever space was available, that's where it went. That's where it went.

MH: Was your mother excited about the electricity?

EF: No, she really wasn't. All we had was a wood stove or a gas stove, so she wasn't excited, you know. She never did have an electric grill, range at that time, so it was all either gas or wood.

MH: You talked about your dad having a team of horses, can you remember when you got that first tractor?

EF: That was quite a ways down the line. I don't think it was before 1936 at the earliest.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.