Densho Digital Archive - George Katagiri Interview (denshovh-kgeorge

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SG: I was curious if your years of living and working in Oregon if you, yourself, ever experienced prejudice or discrimination?

GK: Yeah. I did not experience it when I was a little elementary kid even though I was the only Japanese kid in the school. Nobody ever bothered me or called me names. I was one of the kids out there playing soccer and marbles and everything else. And then I lived in Minneapolis for seven years. I went there to go to school, and I went in the military service while I was in Minneapolis. And in the service, I was mostly with Caucasian soldiers, and they never bothered me. But when I came back to Portland looking for, coming to my first job, after living in Minnesota for seven years, I needed an apartment for the family. And so I looked in the newspaper, and there was an apartment open in Westmoreland. And so I called the number, and I says, "I'm interested in renting an apartment. Is it open?" She said, "Yes." And I said, "I'll be there in ten minutes." So I was there in ten minutes. And I went up to the door, and I says, "Well, I just called you about the apartment that's available here." She looked at me and says, "Oh, it was just rented." And my knees buckled, you know. I wasn't expecting it. If I were expecting it, I would have said something not very nice and just left. But since I wasn't expecting it, my knees buckled, and I couldn't say a thing, and then I left. Of course, thereafter, every time I called, I identify myself as being Japanese American and so on. But that was the most striking remembrance that I have of being discriminated against.

Oh, there are other occasions like when I first came to Portland. I had this job at this elementary school. And you won't believe it, but back in 1950, my annual salary was 2900 dollars a year, and I thought, gee, I don't think I can get through the year on that salary. I needed to find other things, other income. And I dreamed of the time when one of these days, I'll be making five thousand dollars a year. I dreamed about that. But to supplement my salary, I, some of my teacher friends found jobs at Sears Roebuck as clerks. I says, "Gee, I'd like to do that." And they wouldn't hire me, you know. And so for a long time, I wouldn't buy anything from Sears. [Laughs] For a long time, I mean for years and years, I would not buy anything from Sears. But to supplement my salary, the kindergarten teacher at our school had some friends who were building houses, and they, I says, "Well, can they use some help on the weekends or the evenings?" He said, "Fine." And so they were building these two houses up there by the medical school or OHSU, and I would help them put on siding or sand or paint or anything that anyone could do. And one day, I was sanding the floorboards on the floor, and the lady builder who was contracting said, "Hey George, why don't you buy this house?" I says, "I just have a few hundred dollars in the bank. I can't afford to buy a house." And she says, "No problem." She said, "You get a GI Bill, and you can pay for this house." And the house wouldn't qualify under the GI Bill. And so she said, well, she'll carry a second mortgage for me. So I buy it under the GI Bill and pay her a little extra each month, and so that's the house we bought. And did she make me sign a paper? No. I mean, I never signed a paper. I could have stopped payment on the second month and called it quits there, but that's the kind of friends or people we got to know. And not only that, I was paid so much an hour sanding the boards and painting the boards, and so I had a little supplementary income there.

And to supplement my 2900 dollar annual salary, I got a job as a projectionist at a local theater, and I went down and answered the ad. And they says, "Well, what experience have you had?" And I says, "Well, I run the 16 millimeter projectors at school." There's no comparison between a 16 millimeter and an old fashioned 35 millimeter machine. And evidently, they didn't have too many applicants, and so I got this job. It was at this old theater that I think about ten patrons came in every night. But the machines were so old that they were lit by carbon rods. And so they had two carbon rods that when you lit it, you had to bring them together, and they would light, and then they would separate, you'd separate it for part of an inch, and then they would gradually burn out, burn back, and the machines would keep them the same distance theoretically. And if the theory didn't work, the light went out. And there were two machines, and so that was a time when you had to watch the picture and the little tiny numbers came up in the corner, and, but by the time the films got to our place, they had been worn so much that they've been spliced, and some of the numbers were missing. But the numbers were there, then you would sick, turn on one machine and started going and then turn off the next machine, and the audience wouldn't know the difference. But when they're not synchronized, there's a jump in there or a word missing or something like that. Then that's only running the machines, but you have to work the curtains too. So while you're doing all this, you have to run around the machine and press the button to start the curtain to come down, to close or to open up. But anyhow, it was a riot. Finally, the place, one day, one day, there was a Bob Hope film, and so I put it on like I do always. These are great big 35 millimeter rolls, and the image on the screen was upside down, and there's no sound. And I thought, well, it's a Bob Hope film. [Laughs] Maybe it's supposed to be that way. And so I waited a few seconds, and I finally came to the conclusion that some person that wasn't very intelligent put the, rewound the film backwards and twisted it or something. And so there you had a dozen people in the audience pounding their feet on the floor, and I finally had to shut everything down and take the reels out. And rather than trying, I couldn't possibly rewind it then without taking a lot of time, so I just stuck on the second feature and fouled up the features for the evening, but nobody complained. But anyhow, that was the way that I got through the first years of teaching, supplementing my income. Things got better after that, thank goodness.