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AC: Tell me about growing up in Clackamas.

KT: Me growing up?

AC: Yeah.

KT: Well, when I was growing up over there, my first job... my folks were berry farmers, pretty much, and raspberries and strawberries, like that. And so when I grew up in that neighborhood, we had all hakujin, naturally, and they were great friends of mine. So I joined the Boy Scouts at the age of twelve, and my first income was delivering, they call it... it's a newspaper route, and they're gone now. And so that was my job. I'd go to the railroad station and pick up the mail, I mean, the newspaper, and deliver, and made about ten or twelve dollars a month. And so I had a bank account when I was twelve years old, at the U.S. National Bank. So I'm still with it, so you can see, I'm one of the old timers of the bank. The bank has changed a lot, they all start big... it's still the U.S. Bank, and I'm one of the old-timers. So that was the beginning of my income, and so that's the way I started. I was in business at twelve years old. [Laughs]

AC: Did you also work on the family farm?

KT: Oh, yes, that's right, we did. And that's the way I grew up and I raised my family, and that's the way they all... now the thing has changed a lot. So I still have my son, but my grandson, he's not a farmer.

AC: What did you have to do on the family farm?

KT: Well, family farm was still there.

AC: What kinds of jobs did you do while raising berries?

KT: Well, I was pretty small in those days, but we did have berries, yes. That was the beginning. But the time when we moved over, why, I was still going to school. So I was around twenty-four or -five when the war came around, so I was over at a place where my sister is living now. And so they still have the farm, we still have it, it's in the family. It's over in Portland.

AC: You graduated from Milwaukie High School?

KT: No, I went to Milwaukie and graduated from Oregon City High School.

AC: Tell me about how it was going to school back then.

KT: Those days? Well, there was very little discrimination. We were well accepted with the community, and schoolteachers and all, and we had some real nice Caucasian friends. But those people, those days, they were Italians, they were Germans, they were Swedish, you know. That's the way they used to tell me, says, "We're Germans." So the land that we were farming was owned by Germans. So after the war, why, they're all gone. So the place where we have now, my sister is there, and we still have that. So that's in the estate.

AC: So growing up on the farm, what did you do for fun?

KT: Well, those days, not too much, but we did have some local activity. Not a lot, because we were in the country. So we were, most of us Japanese were working out on the farm. And very little access to that type of... today. Things are so much different, that just... and we were happy at that.

AC: What did you do?

KT: What did we do? Well, in the wintertime it was more or less little activity, but most of the time, why, we attended local activities. And when we'd come out here, it was the same way. All we had was mostly your own friends that you met when you get together.

AC: What did you do when you got together with your friends?

KT: Well, they had the local dances... very little, very little. But we never felt anything, we didn't miss anything. It's just something that, but you think of it today, it's a wonder what we did do to ourselves. It sounds kind of primitive, but that's the way it was.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.