<Begin Segment 18>

AC: All right, let's go back to when you moved back from Boise to the Bethany area, where were you living?

JT: Farmer Bill, he had one of these old farmhouses. There was four bedrooms upstairs, Farmer Bill lived downstairs, and since Helen had one bedroom, and then the three boys, Ike and I and George had one bedroom, and then my brother Henry finally got married, he had the other bedroom with his bride. And the one room was made into a kitchen, okay? I don't know if you remember the old orange crates, they had a block, and you had that one shelf, or that one partition between that was set on each side, and a board was put between there. And then a single hotplate was, served as a source of heating, I mean, cooking. And we had to haul water up there, and so Toshiko, Henry's wife, would cook meals up there. And as far as summertime, it was all right because you could... I don't think Farmer Bill really believed in bathing. [Laughs] You know the old saying, every Saturday they'd bathe, the farmers? God, I believe it, too. But we would take one bucket of hot water -- summertime -- and then stand on this slab of cement out there near the pump, water pump. And then you kind of slosh water on you, and then you soap off, and you take the rest of it and rinse off. And that went on through the summertime, and then when I hit high school, there was the showers. So hallelujah, there was good showers, so I didn't have to do that anymore.

AC: So you took turns of whose time it was to be on the cement stops, or the cement block outside in back?

JT: No, no, then each brother would use that, get another bucket of hot water or two, there'd be two buckets of hot water and then they'd go out. That was... and again, what you don't have, you don't miss. But that was kind of the rock bottom, because the guys didn't have anything.

AC: So you'd boil water on the stove.

JT: Well, he did have a hot water heating system.

AC: Oh, he did?

JT: Yeah. And then my sister could use the bathtub.

AC: Uh-huh. But you guys stood outside facing the field?

JT: Yeah, generally we had shorts on.

AC: Oh, okay.

JT: You didn't have your weenie exposed.

AC: I wondered about that.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.