<Begin Segment 10>

SG: What happened, where did you go after elementary, the school day was over?

BO: We went, actually, we didn't play around. We went straight home. We were good kids. We went straight home, no more playing around here and there. But on our way home, we had our beanies. We practice shooting, we'd hit targets. Then there was a bull we pass, stand there. See that thing hanging between the legs, let's see if we can hit one. Boing. We hit it. [Laughs] We just hightailed it out there, never went back to that area again. Kids are kids, you know.

SG: Poor, bull, sounds painful. So you would go straight home and help with the farm work?

BO: Yeah, uh-huh. You always did the farm work. If it ain't farm work, we had to go in the barn and clean it all up and put new straw for the animals or close the fence gate and let the horses and cows out so that they could drink their water and eat the grass and stuff like that, make sure the gates and stuff are closed. We did all that.

SG: Was there any particular activity that you enjoyed doing on the farm? You have a favorite?

BO: Well, that's a good question too. We had to, like the rhubarb, like in spring, we had to undercover so they get more heat, so the rhubarb would start coming up fast or give the fertilizer, do the hoeing, keep the grass down. If you don't do it, it looks, run down family out on the farm. But if you do it, it looks beautiful. Strawberry, you got to hoe the grass down so that the, it won't be smothered by grass. Carrots, you got to crawl on your knees and pick all the grass out. That was a lot of work too. Take the horse out and put a harness on, take cultivator and cultivate. Cauliflower, cabbage, whatever, go out and cultivate. Dad don't say nothing. After they got the tractor, then I would come back home from OIT and stuff like that, I would take the tractor out and go out in the field. I think it supposed to be done, start that thing up and go and get it over with, but not my brother Jack. He always dug out. What he does is he gets a job here, a job from there, and he says, "You're going on that job." Well, how come me? So why go on the job? And he does the collecting. So he gave me a dollar watch. It vibrates so much that, the dollar watch fell all apart. So I almost tipped the tractor over. I sunk it in the mudhole. There was no way of me getting it out, but I'm all there by myself. So finally, I worked it out and worked it out, and it went back in the hole again. I got the plow, whatever I had on the, the plow, I bent the front end, bent that. I went down after it. There was nobody there to help me. I was stuck.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.