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AC: You said you had to, you stopped going to school to help your dad in the farm. Because he had an accident, or why is that?

JS: His health wasn't good. He'd had an accident too. I remember, about the time I was born he had a, he'd been injured by a kick from a horse, I believe it was. He collapsed a lung, and maybe he was one of the Issei that was, sometimes indulged a little bit too heavily and it's hard on their stomachs. [Laughs] Anyway, I never did go back, and one of the things that you think about, how important an education is today, and it was then, as it proved later, it was then. But at the time, young men who went to college couldn't find a job when they got out, with their degree, commensurate to their abilities. So they all had, most of 'em ended up in fruit stands or some kind of service work and in the marketplaces where produce was involved, and very few were able to get into a profession. Only those who could find clientele or customers amongst our own people. So we were well acquainted with a number of the professional people in Portland who were dentists and doctors, and with people who were with the Furuya Company or Teikoku, or those people who were merchants. But each one of those had a limited amount of practice, whether it was someone like Mr. Takioka, who helped people because he had the language, he could somewhat, pretty much could do bilingual work, and the Yasui family in Hood River. We were acquainted with most of those, some parts of most of those families. But after I'd been out of school, when we came to Ontario, I didn't go to school here either. It just seemed like it wasn't that important. However, I did go to business college a couple of winters after we got here, and that was the end of my formal education. Any other formal education has been probably what I did during my military time, and my connection with education since then's been probably in my association with Treasure Valley Community College. I was on the original board that started Treasure Valley Community College in 1962.

AC: So how did you feel when you had to make that decision to leave school, the first time?

JS: Really didn't bother me. I, he asked me, I finished one semester, or term in high school, junior high school, and when my dad asked me if I'd stay out of school and help him, why, it didn't bother me at all. 'Cause it wasn't uncommon to have that kind of think happen back in those days, especially if you were in a rural area, because there was, you were very valuable to your family if you could contribute and keep an operation going, because sometimes even two dollars a day, why, it was hard to pay a hired man. And when you speak of two dollars a day, we came to Ontario and ran into situations where people worked for a dollar a day. This was in the middle of the Depression yet, so we, I recall hay hands that followed the hay gatherers, hay crews around to harvest hay, and they, all they had was a bedroll or a, they didn't have sleeping bags in those days, just a bedroll, and they'd, if the farmers that they happened to be through next had a bunkhouse, they had a bunkhouse. Otherwise, they'd unroll next to a haystack and slept outside. They had one or two meals a day, or they furnished all their meals, depending on what the situation was. If you were out in the hinterlands farther out, why, there wasn't any place to go eat, why, your people that brought you there had to feed you.

Anyway, there was, it was kind of a situation in those days where we didn't have, for instance, imported, transient seasonal labor. The seasonal labor that did come around -- and this goes back to the days of people from Nebraska, Oklahoma, Okies was a common nickname -- we had Okies around here. We had a lot of people coming from the drylands of Nebraska, and not only dry land, irrigated land too, 'cause they were having a tough time in the Depression. Why, the people with the toughest times moved someplace else if they could. We never had people from the mining areas, for instance, come out here, because we don't know the situation that's affected people in the mining areas, in the hill country back in the East. The supposition is that those people were scared to leave 'cause they had no connections outside. But from Oklahoma, they moved into California in heavy droves. So the biggest outdoor, the migrant population in this area at that time, I think, was from Nebraska and the Ozarks. The transient labor that picked fruit -- and this was quite a heavy fruit country in those days -- most of the people were Caucasian people, and they lived just like any transient laborers, in chicken houses or camped along the river and bathed once in a while, whether they needed it or not. And our towns here were cow towns, really, all towns here were year-round livestock and raising the livestock and the shipping and marketing. And Ontario became a rail center here because we had the Oregon Short Line, had a railroad that went over toward Burns, so we had rail transportation between Burns and here. So when it got to Burns from here, then the livestock was transferred off to other parts, shipped to other markets. The vegetable growers in this area were mostly Japanese, and so we lived kind of a different life than the Caucasian people around us. Most of those people had cows to milk, and that was kind of important to their, an important part of their income, was the cream checks every two weeks. So onion and potato growers kind of lived hand to mouth, hoping that you had a, some kind of a profit at the end of the year. Those days, you didn't do, you didn't do it by book work. You looked at the bank account at the end of the year, or what you had buried, and if you had some left, why, you had a good year. Even we had chickens and pigs; we raised a few of those and had somebody, one of our white neighbors, come and help us process the meat. But as far as my education is concerned, I didn't miss it at the time, but I can see where life was maybe a little bit harder to adjust for me because of lack of a social education.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.