Densho Digital Archive - Isao Kameshige Interview (denshovh-kisao

<Begin Segment 6>

AC: So what about going to school? Where did you go to school?

IK: I went to... I started grammar school in Coyote, in California, and then from there I went to Hollister grammar school. And then from there I went to San Benito County High School, and I graduated there just before the war.

AC: Were there very many Japanese students there at all?

IK: Oh, yes. I think we had about thirty, twenty-something anyway, graduating. Well, maybe not quite that many. Fifteen to twenty students that were graduating, and we had to memorize the Constitution, the preamble and the Constitution, so that while we were graduating early. So instead of having tests at the end of the year, he says, "Well, we're going to meet together, and you have to memorize the Constitution and the preamble. And then we all, he'd pick on a person and he had to recite what was in the Constitution at certain spots. And so that's how all of us graduated. But I was having a tough time. [Laughs] But I got by.

AC: Do you remember any of your teachers?

IK: Oh, yes. Mrs. Goodnow, I remember, that was in grammar school. I remember she was real strict. The reason I remember her is because there was a girl named Bernice, and she got kind of sassy, and this teacher slapped her. And I remember that really shook everybody up. That's the reason I remember her. [Laughs] I remember the teachers, but I don't remember all their names. She's the only one I remember.

AC: So what was it like going to school back then?

IK: Good. We had a bunch from San Juan Bautista, and there was a lot of Nihonjins there that grew strawberries and lettuce. Well, they grew lettuce, mostly at that time. And there was quite a big bunch of San Juan people that came to our school, too. in fact, our basketball team, there was three of us. There was three Niseis that played on that basketball team for the high school, and Joe Obata, I still... well, I don't see them, but I used to go down and see 'em after I first moved here, because I didn't have anybody here that I knew very well. But I had a good friend named Roy Uyeno that I still talk with every once in a while. But this Joe Obata was our best player, he was good. And then it was me, and there was four of us. Joe had his brother named James that he played with us, too, but he was a little lower grade, so he was usually starting with us. And then we had a Japanese basketball team that traveled, too, that we used to call ourselves the Purple Bombers. [Laughs] And we played in San Jose and Salinas and Watsonville, we played those teams there. That was when I was still going to high school. But there was no complications there.

AC: I want to go back to something. You had mentioned that when you were down in, I think it was Coyote, that's when the Depression hit. And you had horses, cars, trucks, and property there, and you lost it all?

IK: Well, we didn't have property, we just had the equipment for farming. Yeah, we lost the major portion of it. All we had left was a Model T Ford pickup. And then from there we got, I think we just started over again. And we grew broccoli there in Coyote, I remember that, and we had to cut it while it was still wintertime when it was cold and rainy. And when we moved to Hollister, it was pretty good there. But we never got rich, I'll say that. [Laughs]

AC: So your favorite sport, the things you loved to do when you were in high school was play basketball? That was your sport?

IK: Yes, that's about all I did. Well, I played basketball and played a little football, but trouble was... there wasn't trouble, but we had to work. We all had to work, and I had to go home and do irrigation or whatever. And so we helped out on the farm.

AC: And so that was the expectation of all the children, to come home and work on the farm?

IK: Yeah. Most of them have to go home. That's the reason basketball was all we could play, mostly. I used to drive cars when I was twelve years old. [Laughs] We had to learn how to... well, I drove a tractor, too, when I was thirteen or fourteen. That was when the first tractors started to come out. We had a team of horses that used to get out, and we used to have a lot of trouble with them. So when the tractors came, it was pretty nice.

AC: So who did you sell your produce to?

IK: Well, like the tomatoes, we had a lot of tomatoes in the cannery, Del Monte cannery company used to buy that. And the Spreckles Sugar took over all the sugar beets, so we had to haul that to Spreckles and Salinas. And we had garlic and lettuce, too, they came and bought those. We didn't have no certain place to go.

AC: So you'd all load up the truck and drive to Salinas?

IK: Yeah. And then we started growing seed for Rohnert Seed, and we used to grow carrot seed, some other types of seed. And their owners were pretty close to us, our operation, so it wasn't too bad of a job getting it to them.

AC: Did you ever go to Japanese school at all?

IK: Yeah, we had, our school didn't start until real late, because we didn't have any and they wanted to start one. And so we went to Japanese school, I think we had it for about three years, and we started at, just went to school on Saturdays and we started at Book 1. They call that, the alphabet katakana and hiragana. Katakana is the basic alphabet, and hiragana is a little more upgraded, but it's the same alphabet, it's more sophisticated. And the characters were all derived from hard kanji. But I got to the point where I could read the... well, I could still read the hiragana, but the kanji, I have no idea what it stands for. [Laughs] But that's as far as I got.