Densho Digital Archive - Ted Hachiya Interview (denshovh-hted

<Begin Segment 23>

MP: Yeah. Tell me about what you do with all that food.

TH: Well, to begin with, I became like a kim chee king. He knows what kim chee is. He goes to Korean restaurant, but he knows about more varieties than I do. I just make Chinese cabbage and pickles, cucumbers. But the Koreans, I got a couple Korean friends that they want, they want mine.

MP: You have a real food and cooking background.

TH: Yeah. Well, my grandfather was pantry chef. My dad was cook.

MP: Your grandfather was what?

TH: Pantry chef at the University Club.

MP: And your father?

TH: Father was just a cook. He was second cook they called it. Me, I was a flunky. I washed dishes. I washed pans that you dirtied or all the cooks dirtied and mopped the floors, cleaned the tables off. I did that kind of work, but I watched them cook.

MP: And then what about that, you know, that thing with Jake's?

TH: Oh, yeah. Well, I wasn't instrumental, but Jake's found out that my dad could make a bisque, crawfish bisque soup that he was, you know, well known for, and the customers used to tell him, "Hey, Huntington Club has got better bisque soup than you have," so he got curious. He knew Chef Horne. He was a German fellow. He was the chef, and he asked a sample of the bisque soup, so he had me run it over after Dad made it. And he said, "Who makes this?" I says, "My father." He says, "Ask him if he'll come work for me." So you ask him yourself. You know, I can't tell him. So he phoned my father, and he offered him a job. He says, "What are you making?" Says, "None of your business," my dad told him. He says, "Well, I'll give you more money than you're making now if you just make bisque soup." My dad said, "I don't think you would want to know how I make it, so I'll stay where I am." God, I used to mash the stuff all --

MP: Why? Why did your father turn that job down?

TH: He didn't actually want to go to work in a restaurant like that. He liked Arlington Club. Arlington Club had lots of, he was allowed, he went to work for them pretty cheap wages. He says, "If you allow me to take home all the stuff that goes in the garbage and feed my family and do my laundry for me, all the clothes I have to wear and change all the time," they were very strict about clothing, you know. You had to wear a starched shirt, pants, cap. And he got that privilege, so I learned to eat a lot of things that people never got used to. But you know, the guys that go to Arlington Club, they eat simple things like lamb stew, oxtail, braised oxtail, you know. What else I used to have to make? I used to wait on Bishop Dagwell.

MP: Yeah. Tell me the Bishop Dagwell story.

TH: Yeah. He actually had a room there. He'd come in late, maybe about eight or nine o'clock, you know, and he'd send for food from the kitchen. The kitchen was closed. But he'd come in and say, "I want two lamb chops, Boy." Anyway --

MP: To you?

TH: Yeah. Anyway, I said, "There's no cook here." "Well, you know how to cook." "Well, I guess I can put two lamb chops on, but I just cleaned the broiler." He says, "Well, you clean it again." You know, he was a kind of an old geezer. He had me put the lamb chops on there. He says, "Hey, when you serve lamb chops, you got to cross them on the plate." You know, you had to have it a certain way, and they have to wear their, you know, he called it caps.

MP: Those little leg things?

TH: Yeah. Well, I knew where they were. They used to have them made already, you know. And I just slipped it on, and he says, "No veggies?" You boil them yourself. But you know, he'd come and thank me for broiling the lamb chops. Ten cent tip come in with the waiter, ten cents. I still never forgot that.

MP: He gave you ten cents?

TH: Yeah, sent a ten cent tip in. I guess it's still was a lot of money. I only got about $85 a month.

MP: So you worked, yourself worked, your dad worked at the Arlington Club, and you worked there with him?

TH: Yeah, but I was a dishwasher and pot washer then, see, and my dad was a cook.

MP: And you were picking up cooking tips, and so you knew how to cook?

TH: Yeah. But one day he said to me about the time I got out of school, it was 1938, see, I got out when I was sixteen, just turning seventeen. He said, "You either go to work or learn how, if you're going to cook, you cook. Don't go to school." I liked school then all of a sudden.

MP: So did you go to school?

TH: Yeah. I went to Reed, but I think I broke his heart though when he found out I wasn't going to school. I took a lunch every day. Mother would make lunch for me. I'd take it and catch the trolley just runs outside of our house, go to, I mean, go to the campus and play with the guys, but I was never in school.

MP: You just pretended you were in school?

TH: But I got a job in the meantime, you know. I got a job working for the cannery down there. Let's see, what the heck here, Cranberry River Packers, CRPA. I help put in the first tuna line down there. They sent us down to San Pedro and learn how they're butchering the tuna.

MP: Where did you go?

TH: San Pedro.

MP: Where's that?

TH: In California.

MP: Oh.

TH: Yeah. That's where all the fishing boats are and all the canneries are.

MP: So a tuna line meaning a, like a conveyor, tuna?

TH: That's right. There was a conveyor, what they do was the loader, he picks the tuna up by the tail and throws it on the table facing you. And if you're a butcher, it has to face the right way because he has a sharp knife, he slits their, you know, belly open. And then the, then I forgot what they call that guy. He took the guts out, but he had to separate it. He saved the liver, the rendered oil, vitamin oil I guess was the thing. Then they put it in racks, and they steam the whole fish whole. They asked us to go down and learn how they're doing it, so we can do it right. We used to drop on, you know, the tuna is so fat and so solid. If you drop it on the concrete floor, it's splits. The fish will split on the side. We say, "Sashimi." We'd take a tuna home, eat it. Some of the guys couldn't wait. They used to get out there and bring the soy sauce with them. You know, all those Finnish girls, they see us eating raw fish down there. We did a lot of funny things. All those guys that were working the cannery, they're almost all gone. The last of them went not too long ago.