Densho Digital Archive
Oregon Nikkei Endowment Collection
Title: Bennie Ouchida Interview
Narrator: Bennie Ouchida
Interviewer: Stephan Gilchrist
Location:
Date: September 13, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-obennie-01-0006

<Begin Segment 6>

SG: Did your family ever have financial difficulty having a farm?

BO: Oh, financial difficulty during the Depression time, your price was so cheap. Mom would have the berries picked and says, "Take this down to Pacific Fruit." So I take it down to Pacific Fruit and I leave it. It's consigned, leave it there. If it's sold, we get money. If it don't sold, it's dumped. So we take it down there. But she finally had to go to the stock and get the gold certificate. Finally, it took them out to pull us through the Depression.

SG: What's the gold certificate?

BO: Well, it's, you don't see them no more. But it's a gold card like a twenty dollar bill or hundred dollar bill, but it's gold, and it's worth I don't know how much. You pull them out and spend them up. I kind of hate to see them go, but she did it in order to survive. But the vegetable, we just go out in the field and just cut them whenever we want, you know. But that ain't enough. You have to have some other things with it.

SG: So your parents used their savings to get you through the Depression?

BO: Oh, they bleed it out, so you have to, yeah, drag them out to continue.

SG: So when you were growing up, did you, sounds like there wasn't much time to play with friends?

BO: Well, only place we would play with friends is that, maybe undoukai or something like that but the Japanese school or judo, kendo but only place. Other than that, we had to continue work because at that time, we didn't have the money to buy the equipment. Then later on, well, my brother had a chance to go to college, but he refused. Then Mom said that, after high school, I stayed home one year. She said, "You start going to Oregon Institute of Technology." So I went three years there and learn to do the mechanical work. The next one went to Oregon State. He was a ROTC. That's in New Orleans. And the one after that, no, he didn't go. But then we staggering, went one after another, start going to school.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.