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PS: So anyway, we were able to, well, I think all the old timers here got along pretty well. And the problems started showing up, I think, after people, evacuees started showing up. There was a number of them that came into the area before the evacuation. There were people that moved over in this area on their own free will. Of course, even families from Baker, Japanese working on the railroad up there at Baker, I guess, even though it was out of the evacuation zone, why, it was, since they were working on the railroad, they were asked to leave. We had several families out of Baker that came into, down here to the Ontario area. Anyway, for my family, brother Joe was already in the service. My other brother, Abe, he was married in 1943, and so he was a hard worker when he could, he'd get up at four o'clock in the morning, get out, do things, always the hardest working. But a little ornery, too. But anyway, so he became the farm manager after brother Joe went to the service. And I was given an ag. deferment since parents were getting old. Dad was probably in his early sixties, about that time, the late '50s, but he wasn't in real good health. As a younger man he suffered a pretty bad injury, I guess, when he got kicked by a horse.

But anyway, so that's the way things were going back then. We were farmers so we did what we had to do, worked hard. We used to thin our own beets, sugar beets, we started growing sugar beets back in about 1937 or '36, whenever the Amalgamated Sugar made contracts for growing sugar beets. And also during the wartime we grew lettuce around here. So sugar beets and lettuce both had to be hand thinned. One of the signs of a good worker was to be able to thin an acre a day. Of course, that's thinning with a short handled hoe, and it's a backbreaker. That was the kind of thing that was... that was the thing that we did back in those days. Brother Abe, he could thin an acre a day quite often. But I think I've only thinned an acre twice in my lifetime in a day's period, I try to tell my wife my weak back right now, that's where I got it from. Goes back to when I was thinning sugar beets and lettuce. I don't know whether there's anything, I can make any truth about that or not.

But anyway, that's what we did back before the war. And I can think back, so many people recovering from the Depression days, everybody had to get out and work. I think that's the reason during World War II there were so many tough young men out there, 'cause there was all, so many of them were from agriculture and people from the farmer, hardworking and strong young bucks. I remember during this wartime period we had some evacuees working for us. And told this one kid to grease the disk, so if you get on a tractor and do some disking. I only got the, brother gave me a grease gun, and he didn't know anything about it so he took a little grease and put it on the end of the grease fitting. And that was his idea of greasing an implement. But, well, if you'd never been on the farm where you had that kind of thing to run, why, that's what made sense to him. But anyway, we kind of laughed about that. We still remember that.

And it was quite an experience to have kids from the city out there on the farm. Anyway, they were all willing to give it a try. I remember one kid, it was after lunch, I think. We'd come to Brother's house, had lunch, and then we were going back up the road a couple miles where we had an onion storage. This one kid, he wanted to drive, my brother had a, was a '40 Pontiac coupe, very nice car at that time. But he wanted to drive it. So my brother says, okay, and we all jumped in. It was only about three miles before we had to go, and came up to a corner there, and holy smokes, we didn't think it'd ever make it around there. But luckily, he did. Just like any young kid, he wanted to put the pedal to the floor and see what it was like to go. But anyway, some of the strange things I can remember, but it was kind of a hairy ride at that time. Anyway, lot of good memories about, back in those days, the kids from the city, they helped us for a couple of years there. Then, of course, they went about their own lives and different places.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.