<Begin Segment 7>

MH: After you retired from your job at the library, what did you do? What were your interests in retirement?

KG: Well, I didn't have much time to think because my darling husband decided they looking for person to carry, pick up the Japanese Ancestral Society office chores, and he had already says I think you better go. And so I was out in retirement less than a month when I had to go there, and I worked there for twenty years.

MH: And what is the Japanese Ancestor Society?

KG: Well, you know, A lot of people that ask me, "What do they do?" You have to really think. You hate to say this, but I really couldn't tell you exactly what their job was, but I do know they tried to keep the liaison between the, oh, what is it, the consul's offices and the general people. And they had community things too that they kind of overlooked for everybody. So that was, it was in general that they were looking after the interest of the Japanese populous, and they had, that's what they did.

MH: What did your job, what did you do?

KG: My job? My job was to keep their books and keep up their, well, they had the memberships so I had to keep up that. And they also had, they overlooked the Japanese cemetery part, and they had a group of men that took care of that part, and we had donations for the upkeep of the cemetery. So we had to take care of all that kind of things. And of course, we had, we checked to see that we kept their, they had meetings and stuff. We kept that so we kept that so they would know we wouldn't overlap or that kind of stuff. It's just general office work.

MH: And did you drive to work? Where was the office?

KG: I didn't mind, it just kept me, kept my, it just kept me thinking.

MH: Where did they have their office?

KG: Originally, they had it in Portland for gosh... well anyway, they had their office down there. I remember we had to go there. And then they opened up the retirement home for the, well, shall I say the low income people here for the Japanese people in Oak Grove, and then we moved over there.

MH: So the name of that retirement home is --

KG: Ikoi, so.

MH: Ikoi, so.

KG: Uh-huh. And the sad part is of that place is there is very, very few Japanese there. It was supposed to have been built for the Japanese people, but maybe it was because there were too many, there weren't too many Japanese people in the handicapped part of their life. They couldn't get in there because they had a little bit too much money.

MH: What else do you do besides having gone to, you know, work for the Nikkeijin?

KG: My private life is I like to putter. [Laughs]

MH: Tell me what you mean by putter?

KG: I like to putter in my backyard, in my garden. You know, I work a little bit here and go here just to kill the time, you know, the garden work when you weed and stuff like that. And I like to go out and have fun.

MH: What kind of fun do you look for?

KG: Well, the sad part of my life is the girlfriends that I had, they all passed on before me. They were all my age bracket. But we used to get into the car and sometimes she would drive, sometime I would drive. And we would go up to where she used to reside before which was in Washington along the coast there. And then other times we would just get in and where shall we go this time. And so we'd pack up a few of our clothes sometime, and we'd go up to British Columbia. We just did.

MH: You talked about this friend that you did this with. Who was she?

KG: Who was she?

MH: Uh-huh.

KG: She was Mrs. Mary Tsurusaki. She lost her husband. She's a sister of the Itamis, a family of florist there, and we got along like this.

MH: Did you ever get together with your high school friends?

KG: They were all, my real good friends in high school, they were all scattered. Well, in between, there was a war. And then because of the war, it made it a little bit worse. But no, I didn't get in touch with them until about, when did we have that Milwaukie/Clackamas get together? It was in the 1970s. We got together, and we met a lot of people, but they too were not here locally in Portland. They were down the coast in like Florence or down that way. So it was pretty hard for them to be commuting back and forth. We did write though. We wrote letters back and forth for quite a while there. And then this was my best girlfriend, she passed away. And for some reason, I kept up with her husband, real nice gentleman, and we kept writing. And then he took ill, and I think we quit corresponding after he was in a care home. And then I think he passed away because I haven't heard from him. And then my friends here in Milwaukie, Clackamas, they too, they all had farms. They still were farming, so we didn't do too much.

MH: When did your husband pass away?

KG: Let's see. 1986. 1986, he passed away.

MH: So you've been a widow for quite a while?

KG: Uh-huh. But I had my mother 'til 1990.

MH: And how old was your mother?

KG: She was a hundred and two years old. The last year of her life, I would have taken care of her at home, but my sisters kept insisting no, it's too hard, it's too hard. And so they, one day I remember, they both came in the car and I thought what, you know. And I thought they were just going to take her for a ride. No, they just packed her up and took off. And then as my sister said to me, she says, "We're taking mom to this place here." She says, "We won't be coming back." And I said, "How come?" She says, "No." She says, "Too much for you." So they took her up there into the care home. It's on 135th off of Glisan, I remember. That's where she spent her last one year. She was there about a year which is kind of bad for me, but then my sisters didn't want me to, I guess, wear myself out. All they had to do was to come down. I don't think they liked the idea of tying themselves down by if Kena wants to do something, so they got to go down and take care of Mom. I don't know.

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