Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

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AC: So did you, you said you began starting to work at sixteen. Did you finish high school or did you stop going to school at that time?

GI: Well, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, I graduated when I was seventeen, high school. But my older brother Mun, he's called Manabu, we had the service station and we hadn't started the wholesale gasoline business yet, but he needed some help there, and he said, well, rather than hiring other help, it would save him five or ten dollars a week to hire some help, so we could do it for nothing, you see, for spending money. And so it was a good opportunity to negotiate with our schoolteachers and all, and so I probably had two classes a day that I didn't have to attend a certain day, so I would go and run the service station. But I used to work in the grocery store besides going out with my dad and taking orders when I was probably twelve years old, ten or twelve years old and wait on customers. I can maybe barely reach the cash register, but I learned to operate the cash register about as quick as I learned anything in school almost. I remember when I was about twelve years old, I remember the fellow's name. His name was F.A. Richardson. I guess he talked to my dad or my brothers, and he thought maybe I could do a job for him selling fire dust, fire extinguishing dust. It's a can about that long, about the size of a baseball bat, the big part. And he had a Model T, two, Model A, two-door Ford and had a trailer behind, and he had a kind of a shelf that he carried in the trailer and would go to a Japanese home, and he'd douse it with gas, and he'd start the structure out in the fire, then he'd take this fire dust and put out the fire. So I was an interpreter when I was about twelve years old helping him sell fire extinguishers. Lots of things like that.

One of the things I remember that I really appreciated, a bunch of us kids did, the butcher that came around once a week or so, his name was Ernie Gallagan, Butch Gallagan, and he used to give us a wiener every time he can. So we were talking and learning business from people like that. But I've also worked on the farm. My dad taught me how to harness the horse, a swayback horse. The thing about it now, must have been ready for the glue factory, but we still use that horse, and Dad used to get pretty disgusted with me because I had an awful time putting the harness on the horse. But you know, at twelve years old or so trying to harness a big horse, that's quite a job. But I remember doing a little plowing, quite a bit of cultivating, and I used to enjoy hitching it onto a sled because I didn't have to walk then. The horse would pull the sled around. Later on, while, one of our customers had a tractor, bought a brand new Ford tractor, so I started using that, borrowing that to do some of the farm work and all. I didn't like to work out in the field. You see, when we had twelve kids, my mother had time to still work out in the field, and I remember especially the blackberry field. It was all bushes, and she'd tell us, "When you get home from school today, you go out and clean the bathtub and put new water in it and build a fire under it," so the hot baths would be ready for the family at night. Now this brings up another story that maybe you do or don't have, but you heard about it if you haven't seen it or haven't experienced it. A wooden bathtub, it was about two by, it seemed like that there was one piece, the size about one piece about 2 by 24 and built square and then there was a tin bottom. And if we got into the tub, it was probably, the water would go up to our shoulders. And there was a piece of, slats of wood that's nailed together and would fit in the tub so that we would get on that pad and then it would go down to the bottom, so we wouldn't have our feet on the hot floor, hot tin. But anyway, the whole family took a bath in one bath water each day. And you washed outside. Boy, you didn't dare get in the tub and use soap because you'd be disowned if you did that. But you washed outside and scrubbed each other's backs and soaked in the tub. But that was our first chore of the day. But before then, my mother would probably have a cookie or two on the table, which we really enjoyed, went out to bathtub. And if there's dishes to wash and things like that, maybe we had to help with that. But then we went out to the field. Mother had one of our siblings on her back probably. One was probably in a basket on the ground, and so it was our job to kind of make sure that the kids would be happy. We take care the kids while Mom is out there trimming the berries or picking berries or whatever might be. So I've had experience like that. And I remember unloading rotten eggs on our field that we used for fertilizer. I remember spreading manure on the fields. You can imagine, I was twelve, thirteen years old on the field for fertilizer and things. So I had a lot of nice things that I maybe played around as a kid, but there was a lot of things that I did and I've been busy all my life.