Densho Digital Archive - Ed Fujii Interview (denshovh-fed-01-0007)

<Begin Segment 7>

MH: And then what happened to you?

EF: Well, I decided I was going to go to college for a while, so I went to Brigham Young University of Provo, Utah. I spent a couple of quarters there before Uncle Sam says hey, we're going to draft you. So my father thought hey, you better come back, so I came back. We had a farm in Vale, Oregon, so that was in 1944. And I think I got a deferment because I helped out on the farm, but all my other brothers were slowly being drafted. My brother Jack left from there, drafted, and later on my brother Jim left. He was drafted also. And when we came back here, well, I got drafted, so I had to go too. I just left my brother Tom and Tad and my father, but they managed. They managed. They started the farm back up here.

MH: Did you have a car when he was farming in Vale?

EF: Yeah, we had a car. We had a car, and we bought a truck. We had to have a truck. And we had other equipment that we had brought up from Troutdale where we had it stored, so we had a van that brought it all up for us. The only problem we had was we only farmed the one year, so when the order was lifted that we could return to Troutdale, my dad and I went back to see, they gave us a permit to see whether it was all right, conditions were okay, so my father and I came out to check it out, and we decided two weeks later we'd return, so everybody came back home.

MH: What did you do with some of the farm equipment that you had in Vale?

EF: We had an auction out there, and we had an auction with our neighbor across the road, so we got rid of a lot of it there. So, you know, it was items we didn't need back here, so that's why we had an auction, and the neighbor had quite a bit to auction off too, so it worked out well for us.

MH: How did you get all that other stuff back to Gresham?

EF: Well, we had the truck too, so we loaded that on the truck, and we had onions that were leftover from our harvest that year, so we were allowed to take that all back on a rail car back to Troutdale. So we loaded up on the rail car, a regular car, and another family had items too. They were coming back the same time, so we kind of divvied the car up between the two families, and they brought it to Troutdale, so it was very convenient.

MH: Tell me about your experience at Brigham Young. Where did you stay? I'm going back a little bit.

EF: Well, you mean when we got back home?

MH: No, no, when you went to college at Brigham Young.

EF: Well, you know, housing was really a tight issue back in those days. We stayed in a basketball gym when school started. But before that, we stayed in a FSA camp where farm workers were staying because that was the only housing available. And the night before, they had some violence where somebody came through there with a shotgun, and some people were hurt because they were Japanese, and there were some people that was really against that housing. But like I said, we weren't quite there yet, so we didn't have to, but I know some people got wounded from, or injured from those people who raises that kind of commotion while we were there. But from there, we moved into a regular dormitory housing that the college had, and we stayed there a couple weeks, but we were finally able to find housing in the medical clinic room adjacent to the clinic, and we had five people staying there, so it was kind of pack, but we managed. We managed our time during the school. And we worked, we didn't have to give money for the room. We put in two hours helping with the upkeep of a family home of one of the doctors, the main doctor, so that's how we paid our rent.

MH: And where did you eat?

EF: And we also worked on the university farm on the weekends because we were, you know, people were knowledgeable, and the farm manager happened to be a Nisei also, so he knew that we could do the job, so we at least put in at least one day a week on the farm helping with the harvesting a few items like potatoes and those items, those winter crops.