Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

<Begin Segment 8>

AC: I want to know more about what it was like to go out and deliveries and taking orders with your dad, driving around in a car? Was it all these Japanese families that you visited?

GI: The oldest car I remember that my dad had was a 1926 Chevrolet with a Ferry body. The company of the, that built the body is named Ferry I guess, and it was a box that was put on a Chevrolet chassis. My dad drove that thing for I don't know how many years, but I remember at the very end that half of the front right fender was gone, and you know, couldn't afford to buy another delivery wagon. Then later on in 1929 or so, we took the body off of that '26 Chevy and put it on a chassis. We made a chassis of a '28 Chevy and put the body on a '28 Chevy. That's how tough the times were as far as delivery went. And another thing too that I recall during the time of that '26 Chevy deal was a 30 by three and a half tires that were on the car, and they were what you call clincher tires. By clincher tires, you know that the wheels today have, your tires come in and just fit down here like this. Those days, the clincher tire bead went around a hook here so to keep the tire on the rim. Well, the manufacturers couldn't build those tires good enough so that the rim wouldn't cut the tire. So we used to have so many tires that the rims would ruin the tires, and we're having flats all the time. I just felt so bad for Dad when that type of thing happened. But of course, we didn't know any better because everybody else had the clincher tires. But then in the next two or three years, then they came out with the standard tire with tubes in them. Now we don't have tubes, but we used to have tubes in them, and still, we used to have a lot of flat tires because of it. Gasoline those days were probably about fifteen cents a gallon. When the war started, we were wholesaling our gasoline, the regular grade for seventeen cents a gallon. We paid fifteen cents a gallon for it, the regular gas. We used to sell the diesel oil for four and a quarter cents a gallon. We used to pay three and three quarter cents for it. Oh, stove oil, we'd sell for seven and a quarter cents a gallon. That just gives you an idea of comparison to what it is today. The fuel, of course, is much different today, but diesel, it sells for two dollars and something a gallon I think now.

We used to make, I don't remember the groceries cost and things so much, but it seemed like we used mark about twenty up on groceries. But the gasoline, we had two cents a gallon if we sold it wholesale, and our truck would hold a thousand gallons. So if we sold a thousand gallons in one day, we were really making money. If we could do that every day, it would be great, but it was only about a couple times a week. Art Hamanishi, who lives here in Ontario, used to drive truck for us. I think he got the top pay while we were in the gasoline business. He got twenty-five dollars a week, room and board. But going back a little further in the service station, talk about tough times, we had one fellow just passed away. His name is Johnny Peterson, lived in Algona near Auburn there. He used to work in our service station. I think he started out at five dollars a week. And then finally, I think about time he quit, we were paying him ten dollars a week. Boeing was paying five dollars a day. We couldn't figure out how anybody could pay five dollars a day for somebody working eight hours a day or maybe nine hours. That's when just before the war came along, few years before the war came along, and then things started looking up a little bit. But today, now I suppose they're getting a hundred dollars a day. But the automobiles I remember in 1937, I think we gave around 550 dollars for a new Chevrolet pickup. When the war broke out, I had a new Chevrolet special deluxe coupe with a price of 1011 dollars. I got a new, not new, but fairly new Chevy coupe right now. It costs me $22,000.

But getting back to the store and the tough times, just to tell you how tough times were, I recall maybe two or three times and I know there were a few more times that my dad just couldn't pay the wholesaler for what he owed, and he would hang on as long as he could. And finally, he would always call my oldest brother Tom, and Tom would come and bail my dad out. And you know, I recall telling Dad, "Dad, we just have a little grocery here, but you didn't collect any money." But he had a few drinks of sake there, was feeling good. Then he said, "Oh George, those people are having a tough time. They haven't got the money, and I just got to take care of them if I can." He said, "They'll pay it. They'll pay one of these days." And I kept thinking about, my mother never talked about that, but until after the war, but why we didn't hear more about it, discussion about it between Dad and Mom about that because I knew that Dad was having an awful tough time. There were times when we didn't have change enough in the cash register to change, give change for a dollar. That's how tough times got. And yet, where this, one of the fellows that chew snoots, he used to come across the street. He was a retired railroad man and pay us with ten dollar gold pieces. He was a wealthy man. He's in a pension payment. But he was a very rare person.

And by the way, you might think that, because I never mentioned this, a good portion of our customers were Caucasian folks, and so we were in a community there that, as I think about it, these Caucasian people were just wonderful people, and I'm jumping many years here. But you know, I've thought many times about why didn't those people speak up for us so we could hear them, so other people could hear them, before and after we were evacuated. And I've come to a realization now that one of the most outspoken men in our community was a big dairyman that had about ten tenant farmers on it, Japanese, and he used to probably furnish fifty percent of the milk that was being distributed throughout the valley there, but he became the president of the Remember Pearl Harbor League. I won't mention his name because we discovered that his children were not a part of that. There are some of them about our age, but they were in the same position I'm going to tell you about here. He was so vocal and he got so many prominent businessmen to back him up, and we could see in the newspapers and our friends who communicated with us would tell us which merchant. And the story was, the main picture of the story was they don't want us ever to come back there. That's one reason I didn't go back, but that wasn't the only reason. Okay. Part of the story there that I wanted to mention was that I put myself in the position that these other people were in. America was at war with Japan and hundreds and hundreds of, thousands of our youth of our country, our friends, some of our friends too were being killed and injured in the war. And when these, as far as I'm concerned, they were bullies to get up and take advantage of us when we had nothing to do with it. It wasn't our country, it was our parents' country and gave us a bad time as they did. They were so loud that the other folks, our friends, were just petrified. They would, they would like to have really made an issue of it I know, but they just couldn't find leadership enough to do such a thing. And so I've come to appreciate our friends back there now for what they went through for us, and they've proven themselves to us after the war. Many, many of our families have moved back to the area where we're from, and they've done quite well, and they've been, get along fine. There's still discrimination now. I guess we'll never erase that totally anywhere. But we've done so much in our country like your organization, and the Nikkei organization, the 442nd, and the, we can't overlook the other units that the Niseis fought in as well as the soldiers, American Japanese soldiers who've served since the war and are serving today. They've done so much to make it good for us today. And with the help of these friends who couldn't speak up for us, we've really got a nice place today.