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AC: So in 1934 you made this epic journey in the middle of winter from Carver to Ontario, it took you three days.

PS: Yeah. Well, it's interesting now. You still have an opportunity in places to travel the old highways, especially around the Columbia River. You can still drive up around Crown Point, that's on the old highway, and travel along the mountain area on a narrow original highway. And I would recommend it to anybody, because it's, shows what kind of road that we used to have in that time, in that period of time. And as you come east, most of the old highway is gone. There's probably a few places where they still have the old highway. I think the Blue Mountains, all that old highway is gone, around east of Baker there's still an old section of highway there, and there's some old stone homes, buildings that are still standing. I can remember going by those when I moved over here. The old stone homes that are probably, oh, ten miles east of Acre. And I can remember when we first broke over, coming along the Snake River there, and could see the town of Weiser, we could still see the, I remember seeing the wheat elevator there in Weiser, and it still stands. It was quite a site, because coming over, there was a mountain road, and then you come into a flat section of country and then see an elevator and feel like civilization again. But, yeah, that was a real experience of driving over at that time.

AC: Here you were, a young boy leaving all your friends behind and coming to this totally, place you didn't know anything about. How did you feel about doing all that?

PS: Well, I guess being a kid, it was an adventure, a place where we came to at that time, Watanabes, they had apple orchards, and there was a couple of brothers there. And the Watanabe family, let's see, there's one, two, three, four, four brothers there at that time, and I think the youngest brother, I don't think he was born yet. Anyway, we got acquainted with those brothers, the younger brothers my age, real quick, and so it was the beginning of a new life.

AC: You said one of the things you did once you arrived here was you made pea shooters and started shooting them at bullfrogs. How did you make one of those?

PS: [Laughs] That's a thing a kid would do, you know. You find a little branch with a Y in it and that was the base of your bean shooter. Then you'd find some old inner tubes, and depending on how fancy you wanted to get, you generally found a little piece of leather, that was generally the thing you used, is a little pocket, the pocket was made out of leather, and then you're trying to find some good inner tubes so you can make rubber bands out of it, and then become a big hunter. So it was a fun thing, see if you could hit a bird or find an old house that you could break out a window, that kind of thing. [Laughs] It's just kids growing up, that's the kind of thing, well, they still do, don't they? Breaking, shooting out windows? But anyway, that was an adventurous thing to do, see what kind of weapon you could build, and just not knowing a whole lot about damage control or anything, just shoot at something, whatever you could find, cats or chickens. If you hit 'em, it wouldn't do too much damage, that was the good thing about it, except if you hit a glass, then that was, you could break a glass pretty easily. Anyway, that's the kind of thing that us kids did, get a little fishline and go out and see if we can catch some fish, see if we can go out and fish without falling in the water. Back then, if we went fishing with the neighbor kid or somebody, I don't think the folks knew where I went, or my mother didn't know where I went. So I had to be careful that I didn't get into trouble.

AC: Well, how were you disciplined?

PS: Oh, quite often. [Laughs] I got scolded, and, of course, since I had a couple of older brothers, they made pretty sure that I didn't get in trouble. Being the oldest, was brought up in the old method, the oldest son had the responsibility. If he told his younger brother to do something, well, you did it. I think that's the way us kids grew up. I tried to do things the way they were supposed to be done, and if we didn't, got out of line, why, it was brought to our attention real quick. I think, my Dad, he wanted to get after us some time, and Mother would be right there to protect us. And so that was the way things were. But Dad would let us know if we were out of line very much. Of course, we had no way of letting him know when he was drinking too much. But I remember coming back from Portland one time and he had been drinking with friends, and never quite made it home, ended up in the bar pit. Of course, it was walking distance from home, so it wasn't bad. It was a good life, though.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.