Densho Digital Archive - Isao Kameshige Interview (denshovh-kisao

<Begin Segment 12>

AC: But in the meantime, before you even did that, you went to Cozad, Nebraska, to work for Noal Coward?

IK: Yeah.

AC: What was that like? You went by yourself?

IK: Oh, no, this in a group. They wanted some workers, it comes into the office there, they had office requests for workers, and this came in. And the San Juan people, they got together and they had a group, and so me and Roy Uyeno, we're from Hollister, we joined that group and we went over there and worked for him for two summers.

AC: And this was collecting the sheep manure?

IK: Pardon?

AC: Collecting the sheep manure or drying it, or what did you do? [Laughs]

IK: Well, they gave me a team of horses to drive. I never drove a team of horses before. They told me that they wanted me to drive a team of horses, so I said, "Well, sure, I'll try it." And so we have a team of horses, and they have a lot of Mexican national laborers come in. And on this wagon, you have washtubs. They put the washtub on the ground and these laborers, they filled the washtubs up with manure, and then two of them hoist it up, and then there's one guy on top that dumps it in the wagon. And then when it gets full, well, then I just drive the wagon up to the dehydrator, they called it. And you go up this ramp, and you dump it, and you run it through this dehydrator, and it comes out dry, and they put it in sacks and then they ship it out.

AC: So how did you jump this wagon?

IK: Oh, they just have something on the bottom and then they...

AC: Oh, it opens up?

IK: Yeah, there's a handle there, then you just open it up and it all dumps out. And then that one year, the first year, I had a bunch of Spanish people, that's where I learned a lot of bad words in Spanish. [Laughs] But they were real Mexican people. They had these shawls on, and very big hats, and that's how they worked. And then the next year I had a bunch of Indians working for me. They camped there, right there in camp. And then we had to pack our own, the potatoes that they had, after I got off of the horses. I didn't like that too much anyway. It was easy work. But I went to work with our own group, and we started packing potatoes. And we had to jig the sacks and sew it. And we had a bunch of high school girls who were on the table, and that's how we sacked a bunch of potatoes and shipped it out. The one in Nebraska gets some bad hail storms, I'll tell you. We were there one time when the hail storm hit, they were a big hail storm. It seemed like it would knock everything apart. And the cars and things, they get all the dents in them when they come that big. I remember that about Nebraska.

AC: So you'd mentioned that you'd also gone to work for Frank Wada in Idaho.

IK: Pingree, Idaho.

AC: Pingree, Idaho. What were you doing for him?

IK: Oh, all we did was went to work for him for about a month is all we did. In fact, I think that was one of the years that I came home from Nebraska and then I went to work for him. He puts potatoes into storage, and he needed people to stack it. The trucks would come in and they'd have these elevators. And he had big cellars, and he packed it clear up to the top. And I was up on top leveling it off and things for him. And then the friends I was with, well, they were down on the bottom unloading it into these conveyors. And he had a lot of spuds; he's a big grower. Well, Frank Wada died, but his boy is now one of the bigger growers in that area. He's got farms clear up into Montana.