<Begin Segment 3>

AC: Can you describe how, what it was like in your home when you were growing up?

MH: Okay. Because my father was one of the early pioneers in Hood River and probably in the United States, he worked on the railroad, and then he worked for orchardist family and kind of learned how to raise... So he bought a land. It's way up there in the hills. It was kind of, to get up there, you had to go quite a, about a mile up the road to our house. We had a well for water. At that time of course, we had lamps. But then my father got ingenious and bought one of those, I don't know what you want to call it, but it makes electricity. It's one of these things, it's battery, lot of batteries, and it makes electricity, so you have to turn it on a few hours before you can have electricity. And so we didn't have the conveniences. The house was okay, but cold.

AC: How was it heated?

MH: Wood. You know, we had wood trees and apple wood, so we had wood.

AC: Was it a very large home?

MH: Big enough to, for us all to be able to have a place to sleep and eat and take a bath once a week. [Laughs] You know, they had these big barrels, and you heat up the hot water on the wood stove and put it in there. And once a week, we had a bath. But we washed our feet before we went to bed, I remember that. We always washed our feet.

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