Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

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GI: At that time, I was sharecropping in 1943 or '44, sharecropping with a fellow named Charlie Joseph up here in Oregon Slope just this side of Weiser, and I wasn't a big farmer. Our farms back in Washington was maybe somebody had 10 acres or 15 acres of land. And here well, it was a matter of 100 or 500 acres. Today, it's more than that. But anyway, farm was very good to me, and our contract with them was that we, this is very near Paul Saito's place by the way, that we furnish the labor for growing the crops. All of the machine work would be done by the landowner. And so they had tractors and they did all of their, surprise me was I don't know that jackass or a donkey or a what, but they had a Caucasian fellow named Carl Wompler did all of that cultivating and stuff that year. The following year, I did it. But anyway, that's how I learned to put up hay. That's something new for me. When we were kids, our neighbor used to put up hay into the barn, and what I knew about it was we'd go there and play. We go on the haystack and here comes a load of hay and they drop it on us and we'd have a ball, you know. But here, I had to have, after the hay is harvested, to put them in stacks. So I learned words like a Jackson fork and things. A Jackson fork would pick up four barrels of hay at four times in the four barrels of hay. They would lift it up and somebody would go on the top of the stack and stack the hay way up for the winter. And I learned how to run the Caterpillar diesel tractor which we told what we called a slip. They called it a sled. It was a slip. I guess a sled would have had two rails on it, but this slip had nothing underneath. It's just boards and pulled across the land. We put potatoes in cellars or put onions in cellars. These cellars by the way were built into the ground or the hole dug in the ground. And then on top of that, there were rafters and things put up, and it was covered with dirt and straw and things like that to keep it from leaking, and that was the storages of the old days.

We raised, oh, the crop of onions that we raised, I remember the day very clearly because of June the 14th, 1943. By that time, my folks, I had them come out and they were living on the farm, living on little knolls so you can see the field from their house. On June the 14th, a storm came up, and so I ran up to my folks' house, and I was watching out the kitchen window, and I watched, the onion must have been about that tall, June the 14th. I watched the storm come, and this hailstorm came and clipped every one of the tops of those onions off to the ground, just about to the ground. It just ruined the crop. As soon as the storm was over, I drove back out there and I looked, and the odor of the, what you call it in the air just, what onions would do to you. Well, that's the way it hit me, and the air was just full of onion smell. The corrugation where we ran the water was all full of hail. You know, there had been rain with it, so the hail came and come clear down to, covered the whole field, but a lot of it came down in the field, and oh, that made me feel sick. So I got a hold of one of the landlords there. He said, well, he said, "George, that's sure too bad." And he said, "I think the crop will recover. I think we will get a crop all right, so let's take good care of it and we'll see what happens." This is one of the lesson I learned that there's angles to a lot of things that you do in life. After a while, he determined, he said, "George," he says, "there's something wrong with these onions. They're growing okay, but they're not, they don't look like the yellow sweet Spanish onions that I planted." He said that they look like a different variety. Now I don't know whether he was kidding me or not. But anyway, he said, "I'll tell you what, let's go talk to Hank Ankin." He was the boss of the company's farm department. So I went with him and we sat there and we convinced him that they had sold us the wrong seed. But that variety of onion was worth many times more than the right seed onions were. So when the crop was harvested, we had a higher price for them onions than we would have if the crop of a yellow sweet Spanish came up. That proved to me one thing, it taught me one thing, I used that later during that period too. But the Simplot Company who you work for, they had a deal with the government something like we'll pay you cost plus ten percent. The more they paid out, the more they made. Okay? So I don't know. Today, they wouldn't allow a thing like that to go on, but that's how Jack Simplot, the second wealthiest billionaire in the world or something like that, made a lot of his money. About the same time, I was, I had a couple of trucks in hauling onions here, cull onion here, when they sort the onions out, hauling cull onions out to dump here. I go and ask him they want me to do the hauling. I said, "Well, what are you going to pay me?" "Well George, what do you charge? Just remember this, the more you charge, the more we make," so I got the benefit of that too.

So anyway, my farming experience from that two years wasn't too good except that I learned a lot about farming and then about how to grow crops, marketing as well. And we, the following year, we had a beautiful ten acres of russet potatoes. I guess they were russets, and they look great. And so my landlord said, "Okay George. We're ready to sell them now." I told him I'd like to sell them to my brother's outfit, said, okay. In the meantime, I had become well acquainted with these produce inspectors here, got to be pretty good drinking buddies, so it really helped me out, be able to tip elbows with them and stuff, and they're real good to me and to a lot of us. But the question of hollow heart potatoes come up when I was at the packing jet when my potatoes were coming in, and I found out the hollow heart is a disease, I guess, that, maybe it's not a, it's a malformation I would think. If you cut potatoes open, you might see potatoes that are hollow inside, and oh, I said, "Is that right?" So I'm over talking to him, and god dang it, I made a mistake of saying, "Well, how do you, how can you tell from the outside if it's hollow or not?" He picked up a potato out of my field, he chopped it in half and guess what? It was hollow. And the whole ten acres went was sold for cattle feed, so I got practically nothing for it. But I learned a couple lessons there on that potato deal and onion deal. It cost us ten percent, and when you're selling something, be careful. [Laughs] I don't know what would have happened if they packed them and never found out they were hollow. My brother's company might have taken a strike, and I don't know. But anyway, we wouldn't taken such a liking there.

But that and we had sugar beets. And one of our friends that came out at the time still living here, I recruited, went to Minidoka, the camp near Twin Falls and recruit workers for my sugar beet harvest, and so I got five or six of the Niseis in the camp to come out here and topped the sugar beets. You know those days, we had to cut the tops off and throw the sugar beets into the truck. That day, I accidentally, sugar beet knife, you got a hook on it like a treacherous looking hook, and boy, I hit my knee with it. And so my crew, it wasn't that bad. I just had to get out of the field and get it bandaged up, and they accused me of doing that to get out of work, you know. But anyway, we harvest the crops and all. But during the season, these guys would eat dinner. My wife was among the ones that my wife cooked dinner for, meals for, and I'd get them in a, well, I'd get all of us in a poker game or something. I was pretty lucky, so they always accuse me of taking all their pay back after payday, but we just had a lot of fun. About that time, I'll tell you a little bit about elbow bending. We had to ration books given us during the war. They had ration for certain groceries, for shoes, for gasoline, tires, things like that, you see. Liquor, that's one I'm going to talk about right now.