Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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MH: Going back to your school, the elementary school, you mentioned a man who actually taught one of your classes or helped teach one of your classes. Can you tell us about him?

GN: We had a number of teachers there, both men and women. Some of them were accredited professional teachers before that. Most of them had graduated from some college or university. And then we had some teachers from nearby cities, be it Jerome or Eden or Twin Falls. One of the gentlemen there happened to live in Block 34, and his name was Kazuo Kinoshita. And took a liking to Kaz Kinoshita because first of all, he was very competent but also very friendly and really understanding that different students learn at their own pace. He taught different classes, but the one class I really remember him teaching happened to be a special class during the summertime when he taught first aid, and he taught us how to make a little tourniquet out of a handkerchief and a piece of stick. He taught us how to stop a nosebleed. He told us just in case you break your arm what to do. So he got rid of a lot of the wives' tales, and you know, you can't swim X minutes and you shouldn't eat cherry with ice cream and a whole bunch of things that we had kind of lived with for years and years. He kind of dispelled a lot of those misunderstandings.

He was a great teacher, very, very friendly, lived in our block, but I wanted again to fast forward to after the war and picking berries. We picked at a number of different berry farmers in Troutdale, Gresham, but the last place I picked at was the Kaz Kinoshita Farm. And my sister Mary and I had been there for two summers, but Mary being older, going to business college, she elected not to go back and pick berries. At the same time, Kaz wanted me to come back and, I said, "Well, Mr. Kinoshita, I really can't cook for myself. I would kind of starve." So he said, "Well, don't worry about that, George. You just come and eat with us. You become part of our family for this summer." So I went out there, and you live in these cabins. They referred to it, my parents referred to them as boy houses, but they were actually little cabins, and the Kinoshita farm fortunately had a great ofuro, a wooden Japanese bathtub with a live fire underneath. Of course, the longer you stay in it, the hotter you get. And so when you walk out of it, you have to be careful because you could get dizzy or you look like a red oyster, but it was an enjoyable bathtub that I soaked in every night. Each day after berry picking, sometimes I would help them load the truck. But after that's over, I'd go back to my cabin, and Kaz's two little girls at that time, Jane and Sheryl, would tiptoe up to my cabin, knock on the door, and say, "George, it's dinner time. It's time to eat." So I'd march back to the house with them, and Amy Kinoshita would make the greatest dinners. I enjoyed conversation with Kaz and his wife. The two girls were just small young things then, wouldn't talk a whole lot. The one incident that I remember is that, of course, we picked strawberries, raspberries, boysenberries, young berries, and ended up with blackberries in late August. The incident that I remember is Jane and Sheryl were bringing to my cabin a very special shortcake that the mother had made. And so upon coming to the place just two steps before hitting the porch, they fell and the shortcake dropped on the ground. They didn't know what to do, whether to put it back on the paper plate, knock on my door, or just run back to their home. They elected to let me know. We picked up the cake, brushed off the gravel and dirt, did the best we can. I told them how much I enjoyed it. And I'm sure to this day, Jane and Sheryl still remember the shortcake incident at the Kaz Kinoshita farm. But Kaz was really just a fine individual that I got to know well. And later on, as we all know, gave so much of his time to the community to the Ikoi No Kai senior lunch program, highly respected, a real loss to the community here in 2004 as we lost one of our founding members in Gresham, berry farmer, but far more than that, a great human being in Kaz Kinoshita, but a person that I first met way back in Minidoka as a schoolteacher and a fellow who taught me how to stop nosebleeds.