Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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GN: And as I went through Lincoln High School, it was an enjoyable time for me and work ethic that perhaps my father and mother passed down to us. I decided as a freshman that I was going to work after school without bothering my grades or my homework, and I found a company on Northwest Davis Street called Northwest Trading Company, and the proprietor was Sam Naito, and it was a very, very small business. Hannah was the secretary, Tom Sono, and one salesman, Mr. Nichols. That was the beginning of Northwest Trading Company affiliated with the Naito Gift Shop on Southwest Morrison Street. We used to bring in, Northwest Trading Company, big barrels of bone china from England. I used to open the barrel, get out all the wooden excelsior and carefully unload cups and saucers, tea pots, fine bone china from England. They used to bring in things from Japan. But at that time, the workmanship was not there because we're talking the late 1940s. Yes, there was some defective things. The painting wasn't good, the gold would be scratched off, but gradually, things improved and Northwest Trading Company grew, and they hired more people there. And so later on as more Niseis and people from Japan: Sam Watanabe, Henry Ueno, George Hamada, we ended up side by side, packing orders. We knew how to put saucers and cup and saucers into a box, send it parcel post, put it to zone eight which was New England and get it there without breaking anything. So we learned all about packing orders, mailing, calling the truck line, shipping things out, gained a lot of friends by working at Northwest Trading Company which later on moved its office and its warehouse to Northwest Portland up on 12th Street. That was prior to a real growth expansion when they moved to the old Rexall Drug Building in the Import Plaza back down there on First and Couch and opened up a series of retail stores, Made in Oregon. So during the early years, we had an opportunity to work for Sam, and later on Bill came back from University of Chicago. So I guess in fairness I could say that I was one of the very, very early ones that worked for Sam Naito. So we've known each other for many, many years, since the late 1940s, right after he graduated from the University of Oregon, and of course the business has come a long ways since. During that time, I actually sometimes had two jobs. Since our hotel, Park Hotel, was located on Broadway and Glisan Street, we were right in front of the main post office for Portland. So during the Christmas rush, I would take on an extra job, work because school was out, college was out. I would work at the post office and work at at that time called Norcrest China. They changed the name from Northwest Trading Company. So from about eight to five, I work with Norcrest China, go home, grab a bite to eat. At 6 o'clock to 2 o'clock, I worked at the post office for the extra Christmas cards and the Christmas packages. And when you're young, I guess you could do that, and you sleep from 3 o'clock to about 7 o'clock in the morning, and you can go another sixteen hours of work. But it was an interesting time, and I don't mean to say that I was alone. I had other friends that had many jobs.

MH: Now, let me, why did you have to have these many jobs?

GN: One of the reasons that I had the jobs was not actually because of necessity. By that time, the hotel was going fairly well and our hotel, the Park Hotel, by the way, just to explain that we had a lot of Japanese tenants. We had the Itoyama family there. We had the Kasubuchi family there. We had, oh gosh, the Sakai family there. Shig Oka and his family lived there. The Takaya family, Ted Takaya and his family were there. We had many Japanese families because Park Hotel was housekeeping. You can cook and you can do things in your room, and so the Japanese families loved it there, very reasonable rent. They can cook there, it was convenient, they can go to school. They can kind of be with other Japanese folks, and so our customers were very steady. They stayed there and paid by the month, not by the day, not by the week. So the income was relatively stable for my parents. So again getting back to part-time jobs, it was more knowing that I wanted and was determined to go to college. I was determined to go to university, and my parents, like other Niseis, wanted the next generation to do better than themselves. And so knowing that in relative terms, it takes some money to go to whether it's a private university or a state college, I was beginning to save berry picking money, bean picking money, post office money, or working for Norcrest China. As it turned out, Mary happens to be, shedding modesty aside, she only got A's at Lincoln High School, and she could have had almost any scholarship she wanted, and yet she elected to go to business college. But she did get help. She did very well there. I also received some scholarship assistance, but you never count on those kinds of things. I did not really want to depend on my parents. They supported me all through these difficult and challenging years, and I wanted to put myself through college. So that was one of the reasons that I worked rather hard and sometimes holding down two jobs as well as doing my homework at Lincoln High School and so forth, and it turned out quite well actually.

I must add that after two years of university work, I, at that time you could call for the draft. It's not volunteering because that was three years. You could ask the draft board, "Draft me now. I want to get my two years obligation over with now," so I elected to call for the draft after two years. And another thing that motivated me was they pass something called the GI Bill. Knowing that that next two years of college after I finished my two-year military obligation, I would have that at my disposal was another factor that led me to that decision. So it happened that Joe Knapp and I went in together, same day, January 23, 1953, into the service, and the Girls' Club called Sorells put on a farewell party for us, and I never saw Joe thereafter. He went to Fort Lewis and I went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He later went to Fort Bliss, Texas, spent his whole two years there. I went to transportation school at Fort Carson, Colorado, then went to Europe, got cleared for top secret, got to tour all of Europe in a military uniform, so I consider myself, very, very lucky, first of all, calling for the draft one of my better lucky decisions; and secondly, the route that I took going to Europe and seeing a lot of that area of the world really on Uncle Sam.