<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So I kind of want to now talk about the boxcar, and living in the railyard. So why don't we just start with what did your home look like?

KO: [Laughs] I don't really remember that much about it, but I don't know what the dimensions of a boxcar is, but it might be twelve feet wide and a hundred feet long. I don't think it was a hundred feet, maybe fifty feet long, a rectangle. The company had remodeled it to put a sink into the boxcar, and drew cold water to the faucet, put a stove in it for cooking and for heating water. And then as the family grew, my father added a shed or an extension out of the boxcar for another bed. Anyhow, five of us, as I remember, the five kids and mother and father slept in two beds. But there was one bed in this extension section, and another bed in whatever floor space there was. But there was only a sink and a wood stove for the cooking, ice box, there was no electricity pulled to the boxcar, so all the lighting was done with railroad lanterns or kerosene lamps. It was very bare living.

TI: And were there partitions of any kind or was it just pretty much an open space?

KO: It was a relatively, an open space.

TI: And your parents, did they sleep in the addition, or did they sleep in the main boxcar?

KO: [Laughs] Actually, my mother and father and my brother and me slept in one bed together. And my sisters, the three of them, slept in the other bed together.

TI: So two beds with seven people? And so it sounds like there was kind of a cooking area, so it's probably where the, I guess, the kitchen would be. How about like the bathroom? Where was that?

KO: There was apparently a furo, Japanese-style bathtub, built for not only our family, but for the five or six working men. There was a string of, actually, a string of boxcars, ours was one of them. And then there were two or three other cars for the workers. And they apparently had access to this Japanese-style furo also. Now, I say that -- my sister and I don't agree with that -- I thought we used to take a bath in a wooden barrel in our own kitchen, but she says there was a furo that was used by all the five or six workers there in the yard as well.

TI: And in that area, is that where, like, the restroom was also in terms of the toilet and things like that? Where was that?

KO: There was no such thing as a toilet. [Laughs] The chamber pot was the toilet, and every morning, the night after, there would be a pit that my mother would have to empty the chamber pot into.

TI: And your family lived there for years. It wasn't a temporary thing, this was for some time.

KO: No, no. I lived there from the time I was born 'til about eight, and I did not see -- when you talk about a toilet or bathroom -- when I was eight and the family had to move out of the yard because apparently the health department or somebody said, "This is not fit health-wise for a family to live in," my father had to look for a rental house. And we found a rental house with a bathroom, bathtub, flush toilet and all that, which was the first time in eight years that I ever saw a porcelain bathtub and a flushing toilet.

TI: And do you remember what you thought when you saw where you were going to move and what it was like? What were you thinking?

KO: Well, when we moved, we moved into this house which had been vacant for a year or two. And the house was one step away from the wrecking ball itself. But it was adjacent to the railroad yard where my father could just go to work out the front door and then walk to work. But the plaster from the ceiling had been falling onto the floor, the woodwork was molded, black with mold, the bathtub was unwashed for a year and a half or so, so it was black with fallen plaster and black soot and whatnot. Took a week for us to clean up the house and get it to a livable condition. And then we saw, you know, we enjoyed the house, actually. We were there for two years, and then a wrecking ball came and took the house away. It was a big, big cleaning job.

TI: But I guess after it was cleaned up, you felt that it was kind of an upgrade from living...

KO: Oh, yeah. It was a Victorian-style house. It actually had two floors, and the ceilings were, instead of today's eight-foot ceiling, the ceilings were like ten foot. And there were actually gas fixtures, gas light fixtures from the ceiling. And from the second floor down to the first floor, or from the first floor up to the second floor, was this beautiful old banister that came.

TI: Boy, it sounds like it was, at one point, a really grand house.

KO: Yeah, yeah. My brother and I and the sisters, too, used to slide down the banister, polish the whole woodwork. [Laughs]

TI: That's good. Going back to the, living at the boxcars, you mentioned earlier that you were the only family. And so did, over that time you were there, did other families live there maybe temporarily, or were you just...

KO: There was, the first, about the first three years of my life, there was the Oka family, Mr. Oka, his wife, and his three kids lived in the yard. But they moved out when I was about three. I might have been four, because I have some memories about Mr. Oka and the Oka kids, too.

TI: Oh, while they were in the...

KO: In the yard there. But most of the time we felt we were the only playmates we ever had, so we were close that way.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.