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AC: You said you had two brothers.

JS: Yeah.

AC: What were their names?

JS: My brother -- what, now we're on, we're going on, or you're just asking me?

Off camera: No, no, we're back on.

JS: My brothers, Abe was two years younger than I, and my brother Paul is five years younger than I. They both finished their high school experiences here. During the war, my brother Abe stayed home and ran the family farm with my dad, and my brother Paul was home until sometime in 1945, I think. He was drafted in and served in the, I think it was Counterintelligence, and spent some time in Japan after he was, he finished his training. And we were a family operation before the war, and we continued our family operation, in either a partnership or corporate farm until 1971. So their operation was up north of Ontario and in Idaho. One of my, my brother Abe just passed on, and my brother Paul and his sons have taken over the business, ownership of the corporation. So that's about all I have to say about that.

AC: You said you had a family farm back in Clackamas County. What kinds of things did you raise there?

JS: In Clackamas County we were just growing up and it was my dad's farm. It was truck gardening. My dad had a reputation of raising gobo, which is cane burdock, and he had, one of his nicknames was Gobo Saito, 'cause we lived on a sandy piece of ground and gobo grew three or four feet long. It was beautiful, a beautiful product. So we grew parsnips, we grew carrots and onions and spinach and lettuce and cauliflower, celery, berries... we grew quite, everything, I think, except tree fruits, at one time or another. We lived on a place on the Clackamas River that got flooded every winter, and some years the floods were quite bad and being, we were harvesting vegetables all the time, when the water gets so high coming off Mount Hood we would flood out. After so many years of that, I think my dad decided he'd had enough of it. We were buying a farm as, and as Issei traditionally did, well, they had to buy a farm through somebody else. One of our friends in Portland was buying the farm for us, in their name. But we gave it up partways through the contract and came to Ontario.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.