Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

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GI: You know, although liquor was rationed, all of us guys who drank any booze, we were learning at the time how to drink booze because what are you going to do to pass the time. You know, it's a pass time. So I had probably about that thick of liquor permit that I carried with me, maybe about twenty of them, something like that. Well, among those were my five weeks old son had one thinking we can get a liquor permit for anybody that had a regular ration permit, so we never ran short of liquor. Okay. We go to liquor store and deal them out like a deck of cards and find the good one. You know the liquor store, all they want to do is sell liquor, so they didn't care where it came from. If I had a liquor permit, they'd sell us liquor. So my five week old son had a liquor permit. Gasoline was rationed and we had evacuee not, well, primary permanent residence here is like, like the Wadas and Saitos were, never had a binge. We had more gas than we can use. My brother built extra gas tanks to put in the cars and things. And we'd go to some farmer's place, fill the gas tanks up. [Laughs] Oh, we had no problem there. Ration-wise, I can't remember having a bad time. But thinking back to those days, my wife had to walk a couple of blocks to the grocery store, little grocery store in Weiser. And during the war, we didn't have buggies, like, there must have been another name for a buggy, for toddlers to ride in. They didn't have strollers I don't think, at that time. But anyway, the buggies that you could buy were primarily made out of wood and canvas, and that wood, the friction of it, you tighten up a bolt with a wing nut, and that's what kept the thing in and kept it in place, you know. Then you loosen it up to fold it up and put it away. Well, our son was a year old, he weighed thirty pounds. Every time my wife went in a pothole, the damn thing would collapse. And the fact of the matter was my wife wasn't strong enough to tighten that thing up. But then again, our son was so damn heavy that it would just collapse.

We had old, we bought old cars. We couldn't, we had to sell all our cars because we had payments to make on the thing. Several of the evacuees that came out here were able to store their cars or trucks and bring them out here and use them out here, but they were obviously paid for. Talking about that, I think I ought to mention that to correct the one statement that I hear, every now and then I hear it, and I'm sure that I'm correct in that none of us lost property to the government because of evacuation. Nobody had property just taken away from them by the government. There was only one example I know of, I've heard about others. But the one example I know of is a cousin of mine. His parents and his family owned a beautiful dairy up in the Olympic peninsula. He just died the other day I found out. But anyway, I, this dairy barn which was built about 1935, because when I visited there, 1935, it was being built I think at that time before the war, and it's an opera house now. It was that good a building that they use it, it's a very prominent popular opera house up on the peninsula. Well, my cousin told me four or five years ago, he said, we got talking about it. He said, yeah George, he says, "We're still fighting that trying to get that property back." Well, what happened was that his dad was very adamant about things and he said, told his whole family, he said, "We're going back to Japan." This is when we were in camp, and this "no-no" type deal came up. We're going back to Japan, whole family. Well, my cousin said that he couldn't argue with his dad because he called the shots. So I think there was, three of them were about twenty-one years old, they went back to Japan, and they eventually came back except the father died there. And after he died, they came back. And apparently, see, they denounce their citizenship, but got their citizenship back. But the son, here's the thing that they lost the property to the government. I think the government got it. So that's the only incident that I know of that the government might have taken the property, but it was because they renounced their citizenship and went back to Japan. Now, there were many, many cases of where I don't know any in our area, but I've heard about them in California, many cases where evacuees signed the property over to a friend or a company or whatever, and they never got it back, but the government didn't take that. These friends stole it is what happened. So that I want to clear that because I don't want the government be blamed for something that they didn't do. However, I could be wrong, and if anybody has information or I'm wrong, I'd like to hear about it. As far as we were concerned, we had to sell everything.

You know, another good point on this thing was being in a service station business and a wholesale tire business. We accumulated a whole pile of tires in back of our service station wondering what to do with it. They were worthless, you know. When the war came along, we took probably ninety percent of those tires unless they were completely shredded, and were able to, if they were wore out, that's smooth, we had a tire grooving machine. That was popular those days, and we groove the tires, and we'd sell that tires, get good price for them. So it's something else that helped us out quite a bit, rounded up 400, 500 bucks for them, and that was a lot of money those days. Talking about 4 or 500 dollars, I'll give you a comparison on that. When my wife and I got married, my brother told me and they checked up on it for me and said, "We're all ready to go on it." Five hundred dollars for a one bedroom house material, five hundred dollars, toilet and everything without the property also. That's what we could have built a new house for 1941. So I tell that story because when people, when people compare, they think we got a lot of money when we got twenty thousand dollars. A house would cost twenty thousand. You know at that time one bedroom house, you could maybe build one for twenty thousand dollars. So that twenty thousand dollars we got was the equivalent to five hundred dollars roughly at the time that we were put in the camps. That kind of helps people, one of our new city councilmen, when we got that twenty thousand dollars, he had a big sign on his truck saying that we didn't, I don't know the exact words, but he claimed that we weren't entitled to it, that we never lost anything, so on and so forth, you know. And I don't think the voters of Ontario knew that, what kind of guy he was, but they voted him in. And that's one of the first things that he did in the news the other day I read where he said, "We got a crisis in the finances in the city right now." So he says, "One of the things is I wonder about the cultural center, whether we need to put all that money in the cultural center." So we're going to have problem with that guy I guess if he, but he's kind of, I think he's such a timid guy. He's not going to affect us too much, and I think he's going to realize that he better keep his mouth shut because he's a politician. If he wants to get reelected or thought nice of, well, he's got to use his head a little bit. We got the twenty thousand dollars, so what? Worth five hundred of what we have put if we got it at that time, when they evacuated us. So now --