Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

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AC: So you, how did you feel, your family feel at the end of the war when the war ended?

GI: Well, I remember the day that, VJ Day. Three of us were working for the Chevrolet garage here, and I only worked there in the wintertime, and so this must have been August I suppose. But I happened to be at the Chevrolet garage at that time, and there's one of the mechanics that worked with us there. He's a fireman, and he had a '38 Chevrolet sedan with a siren on the thing, so he, "Come on George, let's go." You come through. You got in the car with him, and he turned his siren on. We went all over the town here, just celebrating that the war was over. But we were all very happy. That shock of the atomic bomb, though, it was really sad. I lost a soldier, cousin, first cousin of mine that was there, stationed there, and a lot of people from here lost relatives there. That was a real big shock. But the fact that the war was over, that part of it I was happy. We were all very happy.

AC: And you know you said that your father was changed after the war, that he wasn't as outspoken as he was before or didn't want to do much with the community. What other changes did you notice in your parents?

GI: Well, that was the biggest change. He just... he just, other than when we have a party. We had a lot of parties, and I'm glad that he enjoyed them, you know. We had a family clan of about, oh, eight or ten couples, and we'd get together every holiday and a lot of Sundays and other days there. But Dad, when it came to social gathering like that, he really likes to have a good time. But he never ventured out to, to get involved in the community affairs. Of course by that time, we were all able to. So my brother Mun had reestablished his insurance business, and in 1950, I went to work with him, and my, one of my biggest duties was to help the Isseis. And among those, the most important thing that I think that I helped them with was Social Security. If you know the history of Social Security, the farmers were not covered in Social Security until the 1950s, something like that. And what happened was that the Issei farmers, see, they were in their fifties or about that age, and they didn't have their citizenship, so they couldn't lease land or own land here. They'd just been through hell living in the camps and things because they were Japanese. Because they were aliens, there's a lot of other restrictions too. They wanted to start farming here, and fortunately, they had children. Most of them had children who were of age, so the children could take care of everything for them legally. So they turned everything over to the kids, everything. All the farm operations is pretty much a good percentage of them the kids run them. The parents had no legal tie-in with it. Here comes the Social Security benefits for the farmers. Egad, the Issei farmers, the poor farmers, they work on farms all their lives. They're involved in the farming, was family wide, no benefits. Well, one of my elbow bending friends became representative of the Social Security Administration, and it ended up to, George, I'll tell you what, I told him the story. I said, "Most of these farmers, the Isseis on a farm are partners, so-called partners, with their children or one child or whatever. They run the farm. They give the know-how to the kids how to run the farm." But legality, legally, they had to have somebody to lease. The farmer had to be a citizen. So rather than going through the trouble of making a partnership with an alien citizen and stuff, they just let the kids run the farm. They should get Social Security benefits if they qualify for it. And they told me, says, "George, I'll tell you what, let's give this thing a whirl. You get a hold of these farmers. Any one of them you know and you file a partnership return form if they're a partnership, redo their tax return if after, for the past, we'll see what we can do for them." I think I helped perhaps fifty, at least, Issei farmers to get Social Security benefits that way, and I have the Caucasian Social Security men to thank for that. That put thousands of dollars into our community because I was able to, they let me do the form. So the work like that, I had to be able to speak the language, and I was able to do that, so my dad didn't have to do any of that. Even my dad's deal with Social Security, well, I helped him get the benefit. He had, well, he was short one quarter or something to get Social Security benefits because, oh yeah, he was working at that time. He was working for a laborer for my brother's packing shed. When it came time and he had a stroke, sorry, but you can't work for your child and get Social Security benefits. Okay. Then so I got my Social Security, we found out that my brother was a partner to a non-relative person. We got Social Security benefits for Dad, and the work he did at my brother's place barely qualified him for Social Security benefits. It wasn't much, but he got it all his life and so did my mother get her benefits. But that leads to another story which I'm very thankful for. My mother got seventy-five dollars a month from November 1943 until January 2003 from the government for dependent's allotment for my brother, seventy-five a month. That's nine hundred dollars a year for sixty years. I got to be thankful for that. You know, that's, I got to pat the government on the back for making that type of thing possible. So no matter what you say, this is the greatest country in the world, I guess.