Densho Digital Archive - George Hara Interview (denshovh-hgeorge

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GH: At any rate, as I grew older, time came for me to go to elementary school, grade school, and my father researched it and found out that I could, we're in the Couch School District. Now we were located on First Avenue or even Front Avenue which is right by the Willamette River. And then as you moved westward up towards town, the streets went progressively higher, and Couch School is located on Twentieth and Twenty-first Street on Glisan, and he found out that there was the electric streetcar that I can take from Third and Washington which is only a few blocks from the hotel location, and so my school transportation was riding the trolley and riding it back, and this worked out quite well, and I did this by myself. And the other thing my father and mother investigated to see if there were some other Japanese family in the area that I can sort of depend on and have them look after me, and the Hiramura family lived up there in a rented home, a residential home which was really a palace, a yard, and they had a pond in the front yard, and I enjoyed going there. They had four boys, two were younger -- five boys, two were younger than me, one was about my age and one older and another one that was older. And I used to eat lunches there, and they were very kind and took me in as part of the family. Otherwise, my contact with Niseis at that time was minimal. And after so many grades, I must have adjusted well enough so that I skipped a grade and advanced one additional class.

And after about three years or somewhere in that neighborhood, my father had purchased a lease to another hotel. This one was First Avenue, farther south about four blocks up on the corner of Southwest First and Taylor, and this put our family in another entirely new neighborhood. We were getting into the so-called highly concentrated Japanese, you might call it a ghetto area. We lived in the hotels and the hotels were the most popular business. And between Morrison Street which is only a few blocks north on up for about six, seven blocks up to Clay Street on either side of First Avenue, each block had about four, five Japanese family, mostly in the hotel business, some restaurants, and these catered to the American public, small grocery store, laundry, pressing establishments. And as you walked up the street, these were all Japanese, the other people were the Caucasian workers. And as in most ghetto areas where the Japanese assembled in the city, it was located in what is commonly known as skid row, and among the denizens of skid row were the alcoholics, the muscatel wine connoisseurs. And depending on the time of the month when they came into their monthly check, there would be strewn bodies lying on the street. But this was so common that with a very secure sense, we never felt threatened as part of the neighborhood. The hotel, the shops were little on the grungy side, and the clientele was the low end of the economic scale, but this was all normal, and again, most families had their three room bedroom, living room, kitchen, etcetera. Some families who lived in the back of the stores were terribly crowded. They made one big space do the job of three rooms, but this was normal and we accepted as normal. We would go over to a friend's house in similar circumstances, and my setup up was more luxurious than others.