Densho Digital Archive - Isao Kameshige Interview (denshovh-kisao

<Begin Segment 19>

AC: So you had the forty-acre farm in Idaho, and you bought twenty acres here in Ontario. What were you raising?

IK: Sugar beets, mostly. And then we started to grow onions and that's what helped us. We'd grow onions and then we started growing potatoes. And in order to have a rotation, we started growing a lot of grain. And now, from this year, we're growing corn, so we're progressing to the point where we have to rotate the crops in order to have the crops that you want like the onions and potatoes. You can't grow those every year at the same place. So we progressed, and now, in order to do that, you have to have more acres. If you grow more onions, you're going to have to have more acres for potatoes and corn and wheat. So right now we're up to about 650 or so acres now.

AC: You said in 1951 you met your wife at a dance here. How was that?

IK: [Laughs] I don't know how that happened. We were going in, I remember that. You know, it was pretty crowded, and we were all walking in, and she walked back and started talking to me. I said, "Well, let's go uptown, it's too crowded here." Because I said, "I don't dance," I told her. [Laughs] And so we came uptown to one of the Tutantelle, I think it was. Well, she brought her girlfriend with her, and we just talked and went back to the dance and sat around and got to know her. I don't know, I must have called her. She graduated high school, and then she went to work in Seattle. So she was working for a telephone company in Seattle but she was living at a home, a lady's home. She was a widower, I mean, a widow, and she was helping with the housework. She had a big house, so she wanted my wife to help with the house. She lived there, but she worked in town, and then we used to write letters back and forth and then I used to visit her in the wintertime. That's how I got to know her. Then I asked her. Like I said, opposites attract. [Laughs] She was good looking and smart, and so we got married in November of '52.

AC: Did she grow up here?

IK: No, she's from Toppenish, Washington. And she was in camp in Idaho, and their folks and her, they moved out to Jamieson as, they got a farm, they started a farm up there. Her brother still farms in Vale. They had a pretty big family, I think there was eight in the family. They had a home in Jamieson and they farmed, and then they moved to Brogan and then they moved back to Willow Creek, and that's where I met her father and mother and we discussed things. Of course, in our culture, earlier culture, not anymore, but them days, you had to have a go-between, so that we got Mr. Kobayashi, my mother's relative, we got him to be our go-between. [Laughs]

AC: So tell me about that.

IK: Well, there isn't much to tell, because I'd asked her already, and she said okay, and I went and met her folks and everything to make it formal. I had to take him one time, and he talked to the folks and everything. And everything was agreeable.

AC: How was meeting her parents for the first time?

IK: Oh, well, I just wondered what they thought of me. [Laughs] I got by. And they were real nice to me.

AC: So Mr. Kobayashi, being the go-between, he was someone who knew you and was willing to speak to you.

IK: Speak for me.

AC: So what kinds of things did you tell him to go tell the...

IK: Nothing. I mean, that's up to him. That's up to him. Well, see, they converse in Japanese a lot better than I could.

AC: Oh.

IK: But it turned out real good for me. I don't know what my wife is gonna say. [Laughs] We've been fortunate, lucky.