Densho Digital Archive - Ted Hachiya Interview (denshovh-hted

<Begin Segment 9>

MP: So your uncle was up there gambling, and --

TH: My uncle came in 1939 from Japan to avoid the drafting, getting drafted in the army.

MP: Was that hard for him to get out then to avoid the draft?

TH: No. See, he was a citizen of this country. He was born here. Mother had a lot of other siblings. There's four, I don't know whether they're uncles or aunts. There's four children buried in the Rose City Cemetery. The names are hardly discernible now because it was made out of sandstone, and it's washed out. My mother is not here to tell us who they are anymore. My sister seems to know, but she didn't know their names, but they were a part of Mom's family. So they were, I think some were born miscarriages, really born stillborn, but they had names. They were one year old.

MP: Did you learn this fine art of gambling from your uncle?

TH: Oh, I was a gambler, but I got cured real fast.

MP: How?

TH: Well, I went to Reno, no, Las Vegas, with a load of cherries. I was working in Salt Lake, I drove a carload, I mean truckload of cherries down there in Las Vegas, and I remember the Las Vegas hotel there, and we gambled on the floor, not the gaming table, just for drinks or eats. But I, have you ever hear of anybody throwing a $6,500 crap? That's what I did. I lost the money I got paid for the cherry load. I had to wire back for money to drive the truck back. Well, what I was going to do, I was going to buy a house with that money. If I doubled that money, I could buy, still buy houses for $10,000. The cherry load, I got paid $800, but I lost all of that too.

MP: Gambling?

TH: Yeah.

MP: How did you get the cherries? What was that all about?

TH: Well, I had an interest, I was a silent partner in a produce market, and they had an order for cherries down there, and nobody wanted to drive down there. That's quite a ways from Salt Lake to Las Vegas. I remember it took over eight hours to drive the darn thing, the truck, but it was about ton and a half. They called it a ten wheeler, but it was, I think ton, it was rated ton and a half, I think, but you could put from four, three, four tons of cherries on it. We got extra wheels on the back. They put extra wheels on the back, so we could carry the load. But the tires, I had two flats going down. [Laughs]

MP: So the, were the cherries yours, or were they belonged to --

TH: We, the farmers either consigned them, or we bought them outright. If we had a sale for it and the price was favorable, we offered the farmers less money, and naturally, we make the profit.

MP: Who's "we"?

TH: Well, I had a partner called Tom Kurumata and Henry Nakamura. They were two senior members. They didn't have too much money. I had enough money, you know. I had 3, $4,000. That was a lot of money to be packing around in those days, at the start of the war. This was in 1944, I think, yeah.

MP: So it was during the war?

TH: Oh, yes. But I also worked on the railroad, SPNS Railroad, you know, putting in, I forgot what they call them, the ties, railroad ties, you know. You have to replace them. And I also worked as a whistle punk, keep the boiler fired up.

MP: A whistle punk?

TH: I think that's what they called them. I don't remember exactly. But anyway, my duty was to keep the boiler hot, to make steam to run the engines.

MP: And what engines were these, the engines that were used in --

TH: Portable sawmill, but I gotten a lot of work. I've done gardening work besides a cook.

MP: So being the whistle punk, was that part of... I'm confused. Was that part of the railway thing or was that for --

TH: For the portable mills. We used portable logging mills. They took all the equipment up into the forest and just made lumber right there, and they kind of took finished, half finished lumber in by truck.

MP: So what was the steam dome?

TH: Well, you need it to run the engine, you know, power. You had to use steam to run the machine.

MP: So was that what you were doing? Were you feeding the --

TH: Yeah, the boilers. You had to keep it fired up at a high pressure so it makes steam.

MP: Well, you certainly had a lot of different jobs. That was like during the war, when you were married and --

TH: Well, no. After I got married, my wife wanted me to start my own business. She told me at one time, "I married you because you got a lot of ideas that I know you can do."