<Begin Segment 7>

AC: Tell me how you met your wife.

KT: Oh, I met her in "assembly center." When the Yakima people had to move into Ontario, and that's where I met her, and that's how we ended up, so I got married before the camp closed, went back to, she was in Heart Mountain. There were several camps. But they were in an "assembly center" in Portland at the same time we were.

AC: And you kept in contact the whole time?

KT: Oh, kind of in and out, yeah.

AC: So how did you see her if she was in Heart Mountain?

KT: Huh?

AC: How did you see her if she was in Heart Mountain?

KT: Well, I went up there and we got married, so we come back out here.

AC: So you just, you met in the "assembly center"? Did you see each other before you got married?

KT: Oh, yeah, we knew each other real well before they left, so we were in "assembly center," for several, a couple, three, several months. That's how I got to know her. A lot of marriages were probably that way. I happened to be one of them. [Laughs]

AC: Tell me about your wedding.

KT: Well, there wasn't too much of a wedding. We got married, and then I got the ring in... what's that town there? Out in Billings, Montana, that's what it was.

AC: How did you afford a ring?

KT: Well, I didn't get much of a ring. [Laughs] But it was good enough to get married on. What a ring.

AC: So did you have a Japanese ceremony?

KT: No, there was just the two of us went off and she told her dad, "Dad, I'm gonna get married," that's it. I want to get my wife over here. [Laughs]

AC: What did her dad have to say?

KT: No, nothing was said. My folks never said nothing. Told my folks when I came back to camp, I said, "I'm married." So they were happy about it, and my dad was happy about it.

AC: What about her parents?

KT: Well, she had just the father, her mother was gone quite some time ago. So her father didn't say nothing. Yeah, I knew her father. We knew each other pretty well before.

AC: So how was it being newlyweds in the camp?

KT: Well, we moved out of the camp and came out here, 'cause I was farming here. So we lived in a house out here, that building was kind of, it wasn't farmhouse, wasn't much of a building. Bath tubs were outside, and laundry and everything is just hand laundry, clothesline type, you know, stick it outside in the cold weather, why, things would freeze, so we had to hang it up in the house to keep it dry to dry out. Those are the things that we had to go through. It was quite primitive. Like we see in the old covered wagon days, you wonder how they did it. It's similar to that; we accepted it. And so that's the way life went. Yes?

AC: Tell me about your brother. Did he get drafted into the army?

KT: Yeah, he was drafted, and he was overseas. And then when he got, they were about ready to go to the front line, then he said just as they were getting ready to go to the front line, the war ended, so he didn't really get right into the active part. But he was more or less a cook, he told me, and so when he came back, he was single, and so I said, "Well, get started," and he helped me on the farm. So then I said, well, let's get going, and formed a partnership. Then, of course, I had a farm here, I started a corporation because I checked with quite a few people here, and that was a tax thing. Then my accountant was a Japanese, he came in later after quite a few years. And he still is our accountant, they moved over to San Jose, California, so he's been with me for fifty years. So it's been quite a while.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.