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MR: You said your mother helped in the greenhouse. Did the children help as well?

YH: We were supposed to help, and I could still hear my mother calling up to us to hurry up and get up, because Pop would get angry if we weren't out there working. And so we would sort of lumber out there after we washed up and had breakfast, but we didn't do an awful lot. We would maybe help pull the weeds or string up the chrysanthemums and things that were a little tedious. And then we'd help transplant when we got old enough, but we played mostly while we were young.

MR: So you played mostly. What did you do for fun?

YH: We'd climb, we had cherry trees on the property next door. We'd climb the cherry trees. My older sister Ise has since passed, but taught me how to climb up the tree, where to put my feet so that I wouldn't fall, what to hang on to, and we'd climb. But the minute I saw a caterpillar, I'd just come shooting down so fast. That's the one thing I didn't like. But we'd get a little basket and we'd get some cherries. We had an apple tree and we'd climb that, made a little ledge in the apple tree where we could sit up there, and we'd just look over the neighborhood, and just play, sort of play-play. It was really fun. We'd have nothing to do, we'd go up there and play.

MR: What was the neighborhood makeup like? What kind of people lived there?

YH: Oh, they're just average workers, I think. I don't know... one man in back was a streetcar conductor, and they had no children, but he had a beautiful pond, and we'd go over there and he'd let us come in and sit around there and look. But there were a few children. Two of them across the street, lot of rentals so they'd come and go. And two down the street, we were the biggest family by far.

MR: What did your family do for recreation as a group, say? Would you take trips?

YH: Boy, we didn't take... we would go up to Hood River when my dad had business, we'd all pile in the car and go there, and maybe spend a night at a good friend's up there, and then we'd come home. But we didn't take big trips. When I was young, my father started, he wanted to do something with my older brother to keep him out of mischief. And so he started American Legion, he joined a baseball team. And my brother would get to play in left field? Right field. Let's see... right field. [Laughs] And he'd play there, and then pretty soon he was in Babe Ruth, and then he became American Legion, and then he left, but he had all the neighborhood children play, the young boys. And so the summers were involved, we'd go to all the games they had, we'd chase the balls, and then they'd come home, and then we'd have a watermelon feed and then they'd all go home. But they were all most of 'em young, you know, teens. Maybe seventeen, playing ball for him. And it was a nice thing; it was very nice.

MR: Was it a Japanese ball team then?

YH: No, it was Caucasian. He got a few came and played, Japanese, but I think they came from outlying areas that didn't have a team or something. But the rest were boys in the neighborhood, and we were the only Japanese family within a radius of about ten, fifteen blocks or more, I guess. There was a family on Sixty-seventh, and that's four blocks, but it's up north -- south more. And so we were brought up mainly in a Caucasian area.

MR: What was your position in the family? I mean, how far down were you?

YH: I'm in the middle. I was... one, two, three... fourth child, and there were six of us. So I'm always the middle child, consider myself the middle child, and always thought I was left out of things and had all the hand-me-downs. Stopped here because my little sister was a little chubbier than I was. [Laughs] So family-wise we played a lot together in an odd way. 'Cause my oldest brother and sister were old enough to do other things, but us in the middle, we'd play. The neighbors would come, we'd play kick the can out in the street, and all these games that you don't hear of nowadays. And we'd stay out in the summer until someone got called and it's getting late, you have to come in. And so it's just a real nice neighborhood. And you just, they come to the back door and knock, you know, and we didn't ever let 'em in the house very much. But we'd come out and play, and it was just, it was a nice thing. I don't know if they do it nowadays. You're sort of isolated from your neighbors or you don't really know much about them like they did in the old days.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.